Watch the parkin’ meters

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Joe Weber

Why do so many politicians disappoint us?

In 1965, Bob Dylan released “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a nod to the Beats of the 1950s, particularly Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Subterraneans. The stream-of-consciousness autobiographical book explores a deeply flawed writer struggling in an ill-fated romance.

In Dylan’s hallucinatory, fast and wonderful song, many of the lyrics are memorable, but perhaps none more than these:

Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the
theaters
Girl by the
whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new
fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’
meters

Let’s pounce on the “leaders” lines for a moment. When we look at the number of politicians – i.e., leaders – with serious personal flaws, Dylan’s libertarian final lines in that verse seem prescient and, sadly, all too enduring.

From awful presidents, such as Donald J. Trump, to accomplished ones, such as William J. Clinton, to many in lesser offices, we see people who use their power and various professional positions for sexual manipulation and dishonesty of all sorts. In some cases, we see financial misdealings and political malfeasance.

One key question is: why do such deeply flawed people – often individuals with tortured personal psyches — seek public office? What is it that they seek in politics? And, perhaps more important, why do voters elect them (though not always, as we’ll see below)?

Certainly, many of us are not paying mind to Dylan’s caution.

Everyone knows that the dirt in the lives of the people with feet of clay has a way of coming out. Surely, folks in media know that all too well.

Just as Trump and Clinton’s sometimes sordid misadventures with many women were front-page news, so, too, were those of John F. Kennedy (at least, after his presidency and assassination) and Ted Kennedy. Same with former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, whose presidential hopes were shattered by the “Monkey Business” scandal.

More recently, we had former Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in 2023 after repeated scandals came to light, including colorfully falsifying his background. A prodigious liar, the Republican congressman made up stories about his college education, his employment, his real estate, his religious background, his athletic achievements, his wealth and even his mother’s death (he claimed it was on 9/11). What nailed his career were convictions on wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Santos was sentenced to 87 months for his criminal convictions but served just three months because Trump commuted his sentence. Trump said the fraudster had been “horribly mistreated.” Birds of a feather, perhaps?

Recall that Trump is a felon, convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. He was also civilly found to be liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll, on whom he has sicced his Justice Department for alleged perjury. Trump is on the hook for more than $80 million in the Carroll affair.

Trump also just pardoned the unfortuitously named Stephen Buyer, a former Republican congressman from Indiana who served nearly two years in prison for making illegal stock trades based on inside information after he left office, as The Guardian reported. Buyer was sentenced in 2023 for trades he made while working as a consultant and lobbyist. He was released in 2025, and the Supreme Court in May rejected Buyer’s appeal without comment or noted dissent.

Even though three of the six conservative justices on the court are Trump appointees, the president in effect overruled them in granting a full, complete and unconditional pardon to this convicted felon.

Again, birds of a feather, it seems.

Of course, plenty of Democrats have much to answer for, too. Now, we have a Senatorial aspirant, Maine’s Graham Platner, a 41-year-old political naif who is expected to win the Democratic primary and to run in the fall against the 73-year-old Republican stalwart Susan Collins.

Platner brings a steamer trunk full of personal baggage. Among his offenses are making demeaning social media posts about women, sporting a since-covered up Nazi tattoo and alleged (but denied) reports of physical intimidation of at least one woman he dated. His wife has said he sexted with several women early in their marriage, as she suggested that “no marriage is perfect.”

For his part, Platner has said that recent reporting about him “struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol,” is something he’s been “very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” as Forbes noted. He added there are things in media reports that he “absolutely will take responsibility for…But those serious allegations are just not true.”

Nonetheless, his chances of beating Collins have “plummeted,” as the news outlet reported. “Bettors on Kalshi predict the race is now a toss up with the Democratic candidate’s odds falling from 72 percent last month to 54 percent early on Saturday [June 6]. On the crypto betting platform Polymarket, Platner’s odds have a similar drop, falling from 78 percent on May 23 to 60 percent …”

The stakes in the Maine fight are enormous, though. A win by Platner could tilt the balance in the Senate toward Democrats, putting party officials in a precarious position. Do they hold their noses and support a tainted candidate? Or do they shun him, offended by the stench of a senator sitting with them for the next six years (at least) with much to apologize for?

David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, posed the matter as a choice between “character and power.” He compared the Platner quandary to the choice Republicans faced in 2017 with Roy Moore, a Senatorial candidate from Alabama who, as a 32-year-old assistant district attorney had “initiated sexual contact” with a 14-year-old girl, as well as three other women, whom he pursued when they were underage.

GOP leaders including Sen. John McCain and two dozen other Republican senators as well as then-Senate Leader Mitch McConnell urged Moore to quit the race, even though the Republicans had hung onto the Senate by a thread. Moore refused to quit but ultimately lost the race to a Democrat.

“Not as paragons of moral virtue but as pragmatic politicians, the Senate Republicans of 2017 made and executed a calculation: We are better off sacrificing the Alabama Senate seat for three years than enduring Roy Moore as a Senate colleague for who knows how long,” Frum wrote. “To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: denouncing as liars a possibly growing number of women—or else accepting the stories, but then arguing that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not quite the same as beating her.”

Certainly, the l’affaire Platner knocks the Dems on the back foot.

“Do they want to haggle over just how inappropriate these romantic relationships were, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo throughout most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a literal Nazi?,” Frum asked. “These are not conversations that Democrats should wish to prolong in a year that might otherwise deal with Trump’s abuses of power, corruption, and economic mismanagement.”

Whether Platner could serve as a perfectly fine legislator, despite his dubious past, is an open question. Some argue that personal foibles, especially sexual ones, are irrelevant to an elected official’s ability to do a decent job in office. After all, the argument goes, we’re not choosing someone for sainthood, but just to do a decent job for constituents.

But the problem is that character outs, it seems. It seems likely that the citizens of New Jersey would have been better off if Robert Menendez, now a felon residing in a prison in Pennsylvania, had not been elected. He was convicted in 2024 of multiple corruption and bribery charges involved gold bars, cash and luxury cars and is now serving an 11-year sentence.

And, certainly, the nation would have been better served if Vice President Spiro Agnew hadn’t accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks while serving in various offices before the White House. He resigned in disgrace but avoided jail time even as he paid back hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For Menendez and Agnew, their mendacity didn’t go public before they attained their electoral heights. It took a while for their dirty laundry to get aired. With others, such as Clinton and, certainly, Trump, the flaws were well known and apparently forgiven by the electorate. Now, with Platner, the smudges on his escutcheon are slowly becoming apparent.

But the question remains: why do such flawed people seek the limelight, even when it can sear them? Is there something in their tortured psyches about seeking redemption or justification? Do they turn to public adoration as a way to fill holes in their character and mental makeup?

Perhaps more important, though, why do voters look past their sometimes obvious faults? Have our standards plunged so much that character is irrelevant now?

For Dylan and for plenty of journalists long accustomed to covering political scandal, the lesson is clear. Keep a skeptical eye on all politicians and would-be politicians. Don’t fall in love with them, especially those whose views align with yours. Vote for those who seem to speak for you but recognize that they’ll usually disappoint you in the end.

And, even as you watch their often troubling antics, be sure to watch your parkin’ meters. Perhaps happily, there’s no doubt that the stuff of our ordinary workaday lives deserves more attention than many of the people we choose to represent us.

Moi, moi, moi

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump apes a 17th century king – without his grace or taste

Joseph Weber

In 1655, King Louis XIV of France may or may not have uttered the aphorism widely credited to him: “L’État, c’est moi.” The phrase — meaning “I am the state” — has come to symbolize a national leader’s extraordinary egotism.

Whether he said that or not, there’s little dispute that Louis’s self-regard was exceptional. He saw himself as the direct representative of G-d, the personification of the divine right of kings, and even chose the sun as his emblem. At least in his own mind, he was the omniscient and infallible “Roi-Soleil” (“Sun King”) around whom the entire realm orbited, according to “History.”

But there’s also no doubt that Louis created remarkable monuments during his 72-year reign, the longest in monarchical history (he was anointed at age 4). Among his projects in Paris were the Les Invalides hospital and retirement complex, the Place Vendôme and the Place des Victoires, as well as the tree-lined avenues that later became the Champs-Élysées. He reigned over the creation of the 150-mile Canal du Midi, linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. And he built the stunning Palace at Versailles.

Are we hearing echoes today in Washington, D.C., however pallid, thin and embattled they are? Are we seeing a leader’s massive ego (without the substance of a Louis XIV) in a display of cloddishness that looks like a parody of Louis’s grace? Are we seeing a cartoon caricature of a monarch trying to immortalize himself as he dodders toward an 80^th birthday?

It’s not only the gilding of the White House, the construction of a huge ballroom abutting the place or the planned 250-foot-tall Triumphal Arch near the Arlington National Cemetery that seems to be part of a pathetic parade of self-adulation by Donald J. Trump. It’s also festooning his image on passports, on banners that decorate federal buildings, on a proposed $250 bill, on commemorative coins and a national park pass, his name on the Kennedy Center (though that soon seems about to end, thanks to a judge). And, of course, we have the bluing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, as contractors – whom he may or may not have picked — repaint it to look like a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago.

Now, with a breathtakingly self-indulgent effort, we have Trump’s latest plan to cast his self-admiration across as big a canvas as possible. He plans to turn what was to have been a 250^th celebration of the history of the United States, on the National Mall in D.C., into rallies for himself — opening the fair with a MAGA rally and giving a July 4 keynote speech.

At least seven of nine musical artists have dropped out of the multiday celebration, slated to begin in late June, because of the partisan cast it was taking. So Trump posted this on his Truth Social:

“It’s difficult to read this without laughing, but it’s no joke,” wrote former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who served under Presidents Ford, Carter and Clinton. “His malignant narcissism is ramping up even higher than its usual galactic level.”

But the enduring mystery is why Trump’s devotees apparently see no flaws in their leader’s perverse psychology. To the extent that they are aware of history, why do they not see a man casting himself here as a tacky version of a 17th century French king? Or, more sinisterly, as a Stalin, Mussolini, or Kim Jong-Un, someone desperate to feel and seem all-powerful — but even that in a distorted fun-house mirror way — “a man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime.”

Pathetic? Perhaps the very definition of it. But do his followers really see his image-spreading as signs of strength that they applaud?

Certainly, Trump sucks up attention and flattery like a pampered puppy. Watching a Cabinet meeting, for instance, can be painful because of the way otherwise bright people prostrate themselves before him, as if they are supplicants before Pharoah.

The New York Times reviewed over a dozen hours of Cabinet meeting footage and found that, on average, at least one of every six sentences out of the mouths of his acolytes either flattered Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

“You have saved this country,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. “You have changed America and created the golden age,” crowed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. And the arch-flatterer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking bizarrely of the lingering Ukraine-Russia War, effused “… the country owes you a great debt of gratitude and the world, really, because I mean you’re the only leader in the planet that can bring the two sides together …”

Cynically, one might say that these Cabinet lapdogs are simply doing what foreign leaders have learned to do to try to stay in Trump’s good graces: speaking glowingly of him to his face, and in front of the cameras, in hopes of a friendly pat on the head. Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, told him in February: “I firmly believe it is only you, Donald, who can achieve peace across the world.” Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of Trump’s “unmatched leadership.”

Indeed, one can imagine that such people — with their spouses or trusted advisers behind closed doors — dismiss Trump as, instead, a horse’s ass. Perhaps one day, when Trump is gone, and the memoirs come out, we’ll hear what they really think.

Certainly, the words some former associates have used are far different than those of today’s toadies.

As The Guardian reported, their terms have been “fascist,” “conman,” “predator” and “cheat.” Former White House Chief of Staff and former Gen. John Kelly called Trump an “idiot” and the head of a “Crazytown” administration. Another former General, Mark Milley, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Trump a “fascist to the core” who was doing “great and irreparable harm.” And former National Security Adviser John Bolton has said Trump is “unfit to be president” and “hasn’t got the brains” for a dictatorship.

Still, when Trump assembles his crowds at the bizarrely low-end June 14 Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House and later at the Great American State Fair, plenty of MAGA fans will show up. Recall that many showed up on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump beckoned them to the Capitol, where they rioted.

Trump, like monarchs and despots, is drawn to spectacle, especially when he is at the center of it. But, despite the crowds that will show up, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Trump’s act is wearing thin with many Americans.

About 58 percent of Americans now disapprove of Trump’s job performance, according to the latest polls. Just 21.7 percent strongly approve of the job he’s doing, while another 17.2 percent only somewhat approve and 48 percent “strongly disapprove.” As pollwatcher Nate Silver has reported, that’s less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his term (-13.6) and less popular than Trump himself was during his first term (-10.6).

Whether such distaste for Trump shows up in the November midterm elections remains to be seen, of course. But, for now, with all his desperate self-promotion, this Sun King-wannabe is looking more like someone on whom the sun is going down and pretty fast.

“Losers” abound

Posted on May 28, 2026 by Joe Weber

But all of us are suffering for that

Joseph Weber

John Lennon in 1964; source: San Francisco Art Exchange

Sixty-two years ago, the Beatles released a song that, like so many others from that time, speaks to us today.

John Lennon wrote: I’m a loser/I’m a loser/And I’m not what I appear to be

The song resounds today because “loser” is one of Donald J. Trump’s favorite words. He has applied it to Democrats, to Republicans, to generals, to soldiers killed in battle, to CNN and other networks. He uses it for pretty much anyone who crosses him or sees the world differently – i.e., realistically.

For instance, leading members of his own party – including usually loyal toadies – are troubled by a potential deal Trump has tried to cook up to get Iran off his plate. The critics include Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Roger Wicker, who all worry about an undefeated Iran posing an ongoing threat to the world.

Trump’s response on Truth Social: “So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.”

Of course, it now appears there is no deal, even though Trump claimed on May 23 — just before the senators raised their concerns — that one had been “largely negotiated.” The following day, in fact, reporters were briefed on the terms of a deal.

But all that gave way to the more recent Trump post: “… nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”

And then Trump followed up with a line suggesting that he’s a long way from settling anything with Iran. During a Cabinet meeting on May 27, he contended that the leaders of the Islamic Republic “thought they were going to out-wait me, you know. ‘We’ll out-wait him. He’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms,” the president insisted, as The Hill reported.

The reality seems to be that the astonishingly self-contradictory Trump, in fact, is the loser in the war he started on Feb. 28. Recall that he initially suggested it would all be over in “four to five weeks,” though it has now stretched to three months with no end in sight.

Indeed, the shooting has continued, albeit at lower levels. And Trump has even now threatened a longstanding U.S. ally, Oman, against partnering with Iran to jointly control the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up,” he said during his Cabinet meeting.

Such bizarre comments reflect the inflated claims and contradictions Trump has made throughout the war.

The New York Times recounted many of them in “The War Is Over. The Strait is Open. We Totally Won. The Iran War According to Donald Trump.” As the piece reported, “[o]ften, there was a wide disconnect” between reality and Trump’s comments. It added: “Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to use extreme force, only to hold his fire. In many cases he has made claims of major diplomatic progress that later proved unfounded, fueling criticism that he is trying to calm markets and relieve political pressure.”

Here’s a sampling of Trump’s remarks:

“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” — Truth Social post on March 6

“… Iran, which is totally defeated and wants a deal …” — Truth Social post on March 13

“… VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS …” — Truth Social post on March 23

And more recently:

“I am fully aware that my Representatives are having very positive discussions with the Country of Iran, and that these discussions could lead to something very positive for all.” — Truth Social post on May 3

“I’m getting a letter supposedly tonight, so we’ll see how that goes.” — Press gaggle on May 8

“I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” — Truth Social post on May 10

“We were getting ready to do a very major attack tomorrow, and I put it off … because we’ve had very big discussions with Iran …” — Press gaggle on May 18

“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly.” — Truth Social post on May 23

“… I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal in that time is on our side.” — Truth Social post on May 24

“It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all …” — Truth Social post on May 25

Feeling a bit whipsawed? And, really, is there ever a reason to believe him?

“Only two questions remain regarding the U.S. war with Iran,” Times columnist Tom Friedman has written. “One, how big a plate of crow will President Trump have to eat to end this conflict with at least some achievements? And two, will he tell us the crow he’s eating is lobster or filet mignon?”

Depressingly, Friedman suggests that the war has just served to entrench “the vile, murderous Islamic republic regime.” His claim: “For starters, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will all be remembered as the team that gave the Islamic republic a second lease on life just when it was more on the ropes than ever with its own people.”

And David French, a former United States Army Reserve major, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a Harvard-trained military lawyer who was awarded a Bronze Star, summed it up this way in a Times newsletter he writes:

“The Trump administration hasn’t accomplished any of its war aims. The Iranian regime is intact, perhaps even more hard-line than before the war now that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps appears to exert greater control. There has been no unconditional surrender; Iran still possesses substantial stocks of highly enriched uranium; it still possesses a formidable missile arsenal; and it still supports terrorist proxies that wage war against Israel.

“We have weakened the Iranian military, but the regime is unbeaten and unbowed. If anything, its regional and global position may even be stronger than it was before the war. Before the war, Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz was theoretical. Now it’s actual. And we don’t seem to possess a plan — or the will — to open it once again.”

In other words, Trump and his gang have blown it. They are the losers.

Of course, the president will never admit this; his narcissism won’t permit it. His reaction, instead, will be classic “projection,” with him making incendiary claims about his opponents that really apply to him.

His reaction will be consistent, as we can expect from a doddering nearly 80-year-old. Going back to his earliest years, Trump was known as a bully, according to his niece, psychologist Mary Trump. One can easily imagine him strutting about elementary school playgrounds, taunting classmates as “losers.”

When Mary Trump suggested early this year that her uncle was “losing control” and humiliating himself “on an almost daily basis and often in the most public ways imaginable,” the White House reaction was predictable. Parroting his boss, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung issued a statement to The Daily Beast, saying “Mary Trump is a stone-old [sic] loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.”

Trump’s vocabulary has scarcely improved since his earliest days, it seems, though he has often added vile expletives. The sad reality today is that along with his bullying, cloddish and ill-informed actions in Iran serving as an echo of the John Lennon song, he has turned us all into losers along with him.

Zionism, unembarrassed

Posted on May 25, 2026 by Joe Weber

While Dems tear themselves apart about Israel, this seems a useful reminder

Joseph Weber

John Irving, an American who became a Canadian citizen and lives in Toronto, has long had his finger on the pulse of American culture – sometimes in opposition to trends in his native country. In The Cider House Rules he defends the right to abortion. In A Prayer for Owen Meany he slams conservative notions of patriotism.

So, it’s no surprise that Irving’s key themes in his latest novel, Queen Esther, are antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The book, he told one interviewer, sprang in part from the “criticism and disfavor” Zionism has fallen into. His character reminds readers that Israel is a place where Jews haven’t always been safe but, as he put it, you “could defend yourself.”

Irving, 84 and a non-Jew who has long admired and loved Israel, sets his book partly in the country. We meet his protagonist, the child Esther, however, near early 1900s Portland, Maine, where she is left an unadoptable orphan when antisemites kill her mother, an immigrant from Vienna. As Esther grows up, she makes her way to Europe to help Austrian Jews in the late 1930s and then moves to Israel, where she helps build the state through often-covert military actions that stretch into the 1980s.

For many in America today, particularly liberals, Irving’s book would probably seem ill-timed. Rather than defend Israel as it battles enemies on four fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen – it’s fashionable in many circles to denigrate Zionism, to deride Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and even to deny its right to exist.

“What began as a drop in support for Israel among younger Democrats has become a vertiginous, across-the-board collapse,” The Christian Science Monitor reported. “Today, an overwhelming majority of Democrats view Israel negatively, and AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is itself a target for progressives seeking to purge the party’s pro-Israel ranks.”

The piece based that reporting on a recent poll by The New York Times and the Siena Research Institute. That poll found that 74 percent of Democratic voters opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” as the Times of Israel recounted. Only 20 percent of respondents favored continued aid to Israel.

And 60 percent said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 15 percent sympathized more with Israel. The survey also found that 48 percent of Democrats said the party has been “too supportive of Israel,” while 8 percent said the party was not supportive enough, and 34 percent said U.S. backing was “about right.”

Surveys have repeatedly found that Democrats have become increasingly hostile to Israel, the Israeli newspaper noted. Like other recent U.S. polls, the new survey found that younger respondents, in particular, were more opposed to the Jewish state. In a March survey conducted by Pew, 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expressed an unfavorable view of Israel:

Some of the country’s critics are rallying around candidates such as Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in a party primary set for August. “Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed told CNN congressional reporter Manu Raja on the network’s Inside Politics program. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one — Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.”

While El-Sayed seems to straddle the matter by attacking both sides in the Gaza War, the Egyptian American has also allied himself with Hasan Piker, a fellow Muslim and popular streamer who has made repeated antisemitic comments. As the Forward has reported, Piker’s history of his comments includes denying or downplaying rape that took place during the Oct. 7 attacks and comparing Houthi rebels to Anne Frank.

Then there’s Chris Rabb, the Philadelphian poised to become a congressman. He is backed by Piker and another Israel critic, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He supports a complete embargo on arms sales to Israel, as The Times of Israel reported. Rabb recently posted on X that “the Nakba never ended,” and said he would co-sponsor a resolution with Minnesota Rep. Ihlan Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib to “recognize the Nakba and reaffirm Palestinian refugees’ right to return.”

Disappointingly, Rabb is backed by Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the brighter lights in Congress who also happens to be Jewish. Raskin, who co-sponsored the Block the Bombs to Israel Act, sided with the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and other leftist groups, including Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, as well as groups that work to counter AIPAC, such as Track AIPAC and PAL PAC.

While he says he is committed to Israel, Raskin has split with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Gaza War.

“I continue to hear each day from my constituents stories of pain from their families and friends in both Israel and Gaza,” Raskin said in a release last fall marking the Oct. 7^th savagery. “They speak of the mutual descent into cruelty and savage violence and pray for the imperative of peace and reconciliation. All parties to the conflict must finally come to the negotiating table and put an end to the vicious and hopeless cycles of terror, occupation and war in the region and create a path towards lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, for the sake of both these desperate peoples and all the people of the world.”

Far less even-handedly, we have Maureen Galindo, a Democratic House candidate in Texas who said she wanted to turn a local immigrant detention center into a facility to imprison and castrate “American Zionists,” as The Washington Post reported. Galindo, a sex therapist who has never held office, came in first in a four-way party primary in March and will compete in a two-person runoff race wrapping up May 26.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democratic leaders have condemned Galindo. Ocasio-Cortez described Galindo’s comments as “bigoted garbage and antisemitism.” She called for voters to support Johnny Garcia, a former sheriff’s deputy who said Republicans had “no shame” about supporting Galindo’s “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate race in Texas, also backed Garcia and said he would not campaign with Galindo if she won, as the Post reported. So, too, did the Texas Democratic Party and the chairs of the parties in the 35th Congressional District condemn Galindo’s remarks.

Democratic House leader Hakeem Jefferies accused Republicans of secretly supporting Galindo as a way to undercut Democrats’ chances in November, according to The New York Times. Indeed, the GOP seems to be operating underhandedly, with a political action committee with links to Republicans spending nearly $1 million on TV ads and mailers backing Galindo. The PAC dishonestly calls itself Lead Left.

If she prevails, this antisemite wouldn’t be welcomed by all in Congress. Two Jewish members of the House vowed that if Galindo were elected, they would force a daily vote to expel her.

But the tortuous disputes over Israel have made for ugly twists in Democratic politics. For instance, AIPAC opposed the Democratic mayor of Evanston, Ill., Daniel Biss, in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. Biss, who is Jewish and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, was targeted with negative ads and mailers in a rare instance of AIPAC involving itself in a race with two Jewish candidates, as the Times reported.

Like some others, Biss tries to take a middle ground on Israel, refusing to call Israel’s actions in the war against Hamas a genocide, but saying that he opposes unconditional aid to the country. He defeated a Jewish rival, whom AIPAC supported, who had backed aid without strings. He was supported by Senators Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; the Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul; and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“This is a guy who can’t possibly be considered anti-Israel — he is the quintessential American Jew,” J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami told the Times. “He is at the 50-yard line of Jewish Americans, and AIPAC doesn’t want them anywhere near policy.”

The lobbying group has gotten such a black eye among some Democrats that it has hidden its name behind front outfits in backing or opposing campaigns. As The Washington Post reported, AIPAC cloaked its spending in Illinois in “a trio of innocuously named organizations” — Chicago Progressive Partnership, Affordable Chicago Now and Elect Chicago Women — and ran ads that attacked candidates including Biss for reasons other than his position on Israel.

What’s more, AIPAC, which some progressive Jewish organizations have labeled a Republican front group, shot itself in the foot in some efforts to back more pro-Israel candidates.

In April in New Jersey, for instance, AIPAC funded ads attacking Tom Malinowski, a moderate Democratic House candidate who supported Israel but – like Biss — said that aid should not be unconditional, as the Times reported. Instead of helping a more pro-Israel opponent, Tahesha Way, the attacks turned voters from Malinowski to a pro-Palestinian progressive, Analilia Mejia, who won the race.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, said he “never will” accept money from AIPAC, according to the Times. And Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who once was a major donor to AIPAC, told the newspaper that he “walked away” from the group around 2015, when it began to veer to the right. “I still believe it is significantly MAGA-influenced,” said Pritzker, who is Jewish and a Democrat.

So, while the GOP under Donald J. Trump has given Netanyahu almost carte blanche to move against Israel’s enemies, Democrats are tearing themselves apart over the Israel-Palestine conflict and risk losing some Jewish support with nuanced stances. The progressives want to rein in the Israeli prime minister – as some in Israel also do – even as Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents similarly backed by Iran refuse to yield.

Nowadays, moreover, as the longstanding hope for a two-state solution seems like an impossible dream, some Democrats seem bent on relegating Zionism to the political dustbin. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for instance, in effect calls for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. While he has argued that Israel has a right to exist, he contends it should have nothing to do with religion – a repudiation of the state’s founding.

“I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” Mamdani said in one TV interview. “Equality should be enshrined in every country in the world. That’s my belief.”

Never mind that the 21 percent or so of Israel’s population is Arab and is entitled to vote in the country, just as Jews do. It’s true that Arab-majority parties have never held more than 15 seats in the 120-seat Knesset and are now down to about 10, but that may have to do more with low turnout among Arab voters.

After reaching peak in 2020, with 65 percent of Arab citizens of Israel casting ballots, the share fell in 2022 to 53 percent, compared to 71 percent of the total Israeli electorate.

In 2021, Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, became the first Arab party to join a governing coalition in Israel. And, depending on participation, some in Israel believe Arabs may win as many as 17 seats in upcoming elections. Of course, full representation would mean they would hold at least 24 seats.

But some Democrats would have the Jewish character of the state disappear. Is that not, in essence, antisemitism? Is much of the opposition now to Israel merely a veil for Jew hatred? Or can leaders such as Raskin back the people and the state even as they slam Israel’s current government?

As antisemitism abounds in New York and elsewhere, it is scarcely helpful that Mamdani plans to shun the May 31 Israel Day parade. And slanderous statements the mayor has made, such as in a 2025 release on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7th massacre, do little to move the needle toward peaceful coexistence. “The occupation and apartheid must end,” he wrote then.

Irving’s book doesn’t make such distinctions. The antisemitism that shapes his “Queen Esther” from the time her family flees Vienna, through her times in the U.S. and into her years in Jerusalem turns her into “an uncompromising defender of Jews during a century of violence and oppression against them,” as a New York Times reviewer put it.

In the end, the book is a powerful reminder that Jews – like other peoples in multiethnic states – deserve their own country. Even as they oppose a particular government’s policies, Israel’s critics would do well to heed that. They might find Irving’s latest a useful read.

Preferring yesterday

Posted on May 15, 2026 by Joe Weber

To some, progress is so threatening that even bicycles are targets

Joseph Weber

Seventy-one years ago, Yale-educated William F. Buckley, Jr. launched what has been called “the intellectual beacon of the conservative movement,” the magazine National Review. In his publisher’s statement, he wrote of the new weekly: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The comment is revealing about the nature of conservatism. Many in the movement, it seems, put stumbling blocks in the way of progress, holding that the good old ways are inevitably best.

But what if the old ways really aren’t so good? What if they pollute our waterways and endanger our health? Even conservative darling Richard M. Nixon recognized such problems when he created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

So why is it that the same EPA is now moving to roll back a three-year-old rule that requires coal-fired power plants to prevent the release of toxic heavy metals into streams and rivers through polluted groundwater? Do conservatives really want our waterways tainted with poisonous heavy metals?

“The AI and data center revolution is creating an electricity and baseload power demand that cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement quoted by the Associated Press. “The Trump EPA will continue doing its part to address these burdensome regulations on the coal-fired power plant sector that hold American communities back from the new opportunities presented by this new 21st century energy reality.”

As AP reported, this plan is the latest step that Donald J. Trump’s administration has taken to pull back regulations on coal mining and coal-fired power and to empower fossil fuels as a primary energy source to feed the rapid growth of artificial intelligence data centers. But one wonders: why do the Trumpies so love fossil fuels, despite the planet-wide threat they pose?

Their efforts go well beyond yelling “Stop.” They are assailing environmental progress, turning back the clock.

Whether this involves contempt for electric vehicles, shutting down offshore wind farms or dismantling federal efforts in climate science with such moves as shutting down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, Trump and his minions are seeking to peel back any gains society has made in going green.

At times, their efforts plunge into the absurd. The Trumpists, for instance, don’t seem to like bikes.

Last year the Trump Administration canceled grants for street safety measures, pedestrian trails and bike lanes in communities around the country. As Bloomberg News reported, the problem for the Trumpies was that the projects weren’t designed for cars.

A San Diego County road project that included bike lanes “appears to reduce lane capacity and a road diet that is hostile to motor vehicles,” a U.S Department of Transportation official wrote, rescinding a $1.2 million grant it awarded nearly a year before, according to the news outlet. In Fairfield, Ala., converting street lanes to trail space on one road was also deemed “hostile” to cars, and “counter to DOT’s priority of preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.”

And in Boston, the administration pulled back a grant to improve walking, biking and transit in the Mattapan Square neighborhood in a way that would change the “current auto-centric configuration.”

With such bureaucratese, one wonders whether the officials also have trouble with basic English.

Sometimes, conservatives justify their moves by arguing the costs of protections are too high or thwart development. But sometimes, they just seem afflicted by a weird nostalgia, such as for gas-powered cars, or animus toward blue states. Such sentiments seem to underlay the recently filed Trump administration lawsuit against California over limits on tailpipe emissions.

“Gavin Newsom is determined to continue pushing Democrats’ radical E.V. fantasy — even if doing so is illegal,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement quoted by The New York Times. He referred, of course, to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat likely to run for president and a frequent critic of Trump.

As the newspaper reported, the Trump administration has moved to slash federal support for electric vehicles, which do not emit planet-warming pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency has erased limits on greenhouse gases from vehicle tailpipes, and Trump signed a law last year eliminating a tax credit of up to $7,500 that had been available to people who bought a new electric car.

As has long been true, rightists often point to economics justify their defenses of the status quo. The current crew pair that with a loathing for the Biden Administration.

“Oppressive, expensive electric vehicle mandates drive up costs for American consumers and violate federal law,” former Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the time the suit against California was filed. “California is using unlawful policies from the last administration to create exorbitant costs for their citizens.”

But their efforts often fly in the face of common sense and science. For instance, the Omaha Public Power District has long planned to retire three of five power plants in north Omaha and switch the other two from coal-fired to natural gas. Nebraska’s rightwing Attorney General filed suit last fall to block the moves, though.

As reported by the Nebraska Examiner, AG Mike Hilgers said, “we should not be taking one electron off the grid.”

Hilgers’ 46-page lawsuit seeks to stop the changes, as well as prevent OPPD from pursuing any policy that prioritizes considerations other than price or reliability, including “environmental justice.” Residents of predominantly Black north Omaha have long complained of health risks from the plants, including asthma and respiratory issues.

The OPPD is a publicly owned utility that serves more than 900,000 people across 13 counties in eastern Nebraska, a region that includes Omaha.

As the Examiner reported, in 2014 and 2016, OPPD directors agreed to a plan that, by 2023, OPPD would retire the three North Omaha units in operation since the 1950s and switch the other two in operation since the 1960s from coal to natural gas. The oldest three units switched to natural gas in 2016. The plan was delayed in 2022 and then made contingent upon the construction of two new power-producing stations.

Why this conservative attachment to coal? Why this penchant for sticking with the status quo when harms have long been known?

Encouragingly, the power district in overwhelmingly red Nebraska could be in for changes in leadership that could make for progress. Three renewable energy advocates are advancing toward a fall general election and if they win, they and two other like-minded incumbents, would dominate the district board.

As The Downballot reported, the trio includes former state Sen. Carol Blood, the Democrats’ unsuccessful nominee for governor in 2022 who also lost a run for Congress in the conservative 1st District last cycle. The other is education professor Mark Gudgel, who failed in running for Omaha mayor in 2021. The third is attorney and school administrator Sara Kohen, who narrowly lost a bid for the Omaha City Council in 2021.

When they are defeated in high-profile runs, going for lower-profile utility regulatory posts might give such progressives toeholds for bigger offices later on. But, more important in the short run, they also could help restore environmental gains.

Environmentalists cheered in another red state, Arizona, when renewable energy supporters won an election to take charge of a Phoenix electrical utility company. In Georgia, a couple Democrats scored landslide victories last year in special elections for their state’s Public Service Commission, and Democrats now have the opportunity to flip the third seat they need to win control of the body this fall, The Downballot reported.

It will take a couple major elections to unseat those on the federal level who out of sentiment, nostalgia or just ignorance irrationally cling to the often-flawed past. But as the Nebraska, Arizona and Georgia elections demonstrate, grassroots victories in sometimes little-noted posts can help.

Sometimes, people who stand athwart history get steamrolled. Perhaps the time for that is long overdue.

The Revolution is feasting on its own

Posted on May 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s penchant for firing his loyalists defines his movement

Joseph Weber

Royalist and anti-revolutionary journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan, writing in 1793 about the French Revolution, coined a phrase that resounds today: “A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants,” which translates to “Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.”

We see this in Washington, where Donald J. Trump has been ruthless in metaphorically beheading acolytes.

So far, he has bounced three Cabinet members: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Lower-level career fatalities include Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino; Corey Lewandowski, an unpaid special staffer at the Department of Homeland Security, and Navy Secretary John Phelan.

More recently, Dr. Marty Makary quit as head of the Food and Drug Administration amid rumors that Trump was planning to can him. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged him to jump beforehand, it appears.

And Trump has pulled out all the stops — including a Justice Department probe — in trying to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell from the Fed board. Powell, whom Trump had appointed during his first term, will be succeeded by Kevin Warsh at the Fed’s helm, but he intends to stay on the Fed board for a couple years yet.

In his first term, Trump loved to wield his guillotine. Casualties included FBI Director James Comey, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Adviser John Bolton and White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci – all of whom went on to disparage Trump (and some still do so).

Of course, such highly visible executions are nothing compared to over 200,000 firings of federal employees thanks to sometimes-Trump ally Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Makary’s FDA was gutted by the voluntary departures of some 4,000 staffers, apparently out of distaste with the agency’s tumult and redirection under Kennedy and Makary.

In a sorry twist, at least some federal employees who got the ax were very surprised Trumpists.

An attorney advisor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, said he was “devastated” after voting for Trump and being assured that his job was safe. As CNN reported, he had moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, with his pregnant wife and toddler for the position. He said, “I was expecting to spend the rest of my life doing it.”

Some felt blindsided.

“I was thinking that there would be changes,” a two-time Trump voter and Department of Agriculture researcher told The Los Angeles Times. “But instead of being focused, this is just going completely off the rails, chopping and slicing up parts of the government that are protecting Americans.”

So much for loyalty. Trump, of course, is notorious for expecting it but rarely returning it.

Even more intriguing, though, is when voters are involved and believe that Trump backers aren’t Trumpy enough. That was the case in the May 12 primary defeat of two-term Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen.

Evnen lost to Omaha businessman Scott Petersen, who challenged the integrity of Nebraska’s electoral system on the Lincoln resident’s watch. The incumbent tried to tie himself to Trump’s national election overhaul efforts, but wound up defending the state’s voting systems – something that apparently doesn’t suit the Trump narrative that many in the state’s GOP seem to buy.

“People don’t trust election systems … and whether right or wrong, it’s a problem,” Petersen told the Nebraska Examiner. “It needs to be addressed.”

Petersen targeted Evnen’s handling of vote counting, the news outlet reported. He questioned whether the ballot-counting machines can access the internet and be hacked, argued that voting by mail should be restricted to only special circumstances and promised to conduct full hand counts of races.

Like other secretaries of state, Evnen regularly audited election results, the news outlet reported. But, by raising the specter of taints — in Trump-like fashion —Petersen undermined the incumbent.

That was so even as Evnen in the past year has tried to tie himself even more tightly to Trump. He handed over data the Trump administration requested to the U.S. Department of Justice that his Republican predecessor didn’t, including parts that critics say are potentially sensitive, according to the Examiner. He also started echoing some of Trump’s concerns over elections.

Evnen had supported a state constitutional amendment in 2022 requiring voter ID, and said he’d like such systems rolled out nationally. He pressed for more efforts to ensure noncitizens aren’t voting – a Trump hobbyhorse, but a nonproblem, according to outfits such as the Brennan Center at NYU. In desperate-seeming emails in recent weeks, Evnen pleaded for votes by arguing that he and Trump were “completely in-sync” on mail-in voting, something Trump has labeled “mail-in cheating.”

But Petersen apparently put Evnen on his back foot with suggestions of flaws in the system, despite providing no evidence. As the Examiner reported, Evnen was cast onto the defensive, describing Nebraska’s elections system as the “gold standard.” And he conducted a “transparency tour” across several counties describing the accuracy testing of Nebraska’s ballot-counting machines.

With a GOP rank and file that has been convinced by Trump and his backers that voting systems nationwide are rigged, such rational approaches are nonstarters, it seems. With people conditioned to be suspicious, those dogs just don’t hunt.

Never mind that Petersen’s approach earned him the title of “President of the TinFoil Hat Club” from outgoing U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, one of many GOP establishment figures to back Evnen. The Lincoln resident had a laundry list of endorsements from Republican elected officials, including Gov. Jim Pillen, Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts, and all three of the state’s House lawmakers.

Evnen had long paid his dues to the state GOP by serving such figures in one way or another. But Petersen prevailed by out-Trumping him.

In the end, the revolution that Evnen backed devoured him, much as it has gobbled up so many in Washington. And, with 2 ½ years remaining for Trump’s tenure in Washington, still more are likely to fall prey to it.

While some of Trump’s followers paint in him in messianic imagery, perhaps it is Saturn he resembles more.

“Am Yisrael Chai”

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Joe Weber

But, as for the current Israeli government approach, some disagree

Joseph Weber

A Polish newspaper in 1791 published a phrase since handed down to us in a lot of forms: “Gdzie dwóch Polaków, tam trzy zdania” means “where there are two Poles, there are three opinions.” A more modern version, perhaps from the Borscht Belt or the long history of Judaism in Poland, tells us “two Jews, three opinions.”

I was reminded of this by a rabbi of my acquaintance who recently discussed a decision by her synagogue to change a pro-Israel banner that has graced the building since shortly after Hamas massacred Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. Some congregants objected to the “We Stand with Israel” message, either out of fear because synagogues nowadays are being attacked or out of distress at Israel’s military actions. Others took pride in the message, since lately Israel needs friends when it has become the target of much heat.

Some members, the rabbi wrote, felt all three things at once. This version of “two Jews, three opinions” has a counterpart in longstanding rabbinic tradition, “davar acher” – Hebrew for “a different thing,” she suggested. The phrase separates often differing, sometimes contradictory, commentaries on various matters and suggests that both views could be correct. The text allows for diverse opinions.

There’s little doubt that Jews are split on crucial matters involving Israel now. The killings of more than 70,000 people in Gaza, still others in Lebanon and still others at the hands of Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank have many asking a version of “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” the title of a new book by an Israeli-born scholar teaching at Brown University, Omer Bartov.

Many American Jews disapprove of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, with 61 percent saying Israel has committed war crimes, and about 4 in 10 saying the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, according to a Washington Post poll from last fall. While more Israelis backed the Gaza actions, less than a third believe Israel won, and even fewer believe Hamas will lay down its arms, according to an Israeli poll published in January.

Among Jews in the U.S., opinions about Israel are particularly split by age. While 93 percent of those surveyed by Pew in the spring of 2024 condemned the Hamas attack that started the war, Jewish adults under 35 were divided over Israel’s military response: 52 percent said the way Israel carried out the war was acceptable, while 42 percent called it unacceptable, and 6 percent were unsure. Jews ages 50 and older were more likely to say Israel’s conduct of the war acceptable (68 percent).

So, lots of views. Can all be right? As it makes war so aggressively on its neighbors – albeit in response to real threats – can Israel’s actions be just and appropriate? Or has it lost the moral compass that once defined the nation along with its historically justified claims to the land, which underpinned Zionism?

Perhaps the most unsettling arguments come in Bartov’s new book. The work is especially troubling to defenders of Israeli because Bartov has a lot of street cred. A professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown, he grew up in a Zionist home and served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led in Gaza to genocide, a term he doesn’t use lightly.

Indeed, in the wake of the Oct. 7^th savagery, Bartov published an opinion essay in The New York Times about Israel’s military response. “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza,” he wrote a month after the massacre, “although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

But he has since then changed his view. Relying on a UN definition that says genocide involves acts carried out with the intent of destroying a particular group – whether national, ethnic, racial, or religious – he argues that Israel’s destruction in Gaza meets that tragic test.

As he told New Yorker editor David Remnick, Bartov notes that the population of Gaza lives in less than half of the territory now, with entire cities – such as Rafah – leveled. Unhoused, living in tents and with no infrastructure, the Gazans are “living there like dogs, and nobody is doing anything about it. The plan, the future of the genocide in Gaza seems to be to create a resort town for the rich and to have the Palestinians be the water carriers for that.”

But, long before the Gaza War, Bartov had doubts about how Zionism was evolving. “I served on the West Bank,” he said of his time in the IDF. “The sense, this question that you suddenly ask yourself, ‘What am I doing here? Why am I here? This is not my home.’ It would come up. I can’t say that it was a fully developed political understanding. It was a feeling that something was not right.”

Then, in the late 1980s with the outbreak of the first intifada when he was an officer in reserve, he was outraged by calls from the then-Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, to “go and break their bones.” He wrote Rabin a note comparing the IDF to the WWII Wehrmacht, referring to the process of brutalizing an army.

As many Israelis endorsed the idea of a two-state solution — or at least as Rabin saw it, a self-governing entity for Palestinians that was short of a full state – Bartov was more hopeful. That time, he recalled, was “the last moment of realism as opposed to messianism, which is what has taken over Israel now.”

But that ended with the assassination of Rabin in November 1995. “I remember it well because I was sitting there and holding my six-month-old daughter and crying, and I didn’t even like Rabin,” Bartov said. “He was the last hope, and he could have accomplished something because of his own record, because of his standing in Israeli society. I thought this is over for a generation. I was wrong because it’s more than a generation now, and things are only going the wrong way.”

Any chance of a course correction?

Bartov is pessimistic about change coming from within. As a New York Times reviewer noted, “he says that the leadership, whether Jewish or Palestinian, just isn’t there. Any initiative will have to come from the outside, and he credits President Trump for pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a 20-point plan last fall that at least gestures ‘toward a new political horizon.’” Even Germany, seeking its “greatest atonement” could play a role, he suggests.

As might be expected, ideas such as Bartov’s have their critics.

The American Jewish Committee, for instance, contends genocide – a term first used by a Polish Jewish lawyer to refer to the Nazis’ effort to destroy world Jewry – is a misnomer for the Gaza campaign. “Israel is not seeking to destroy the Palestinian people or the Palestinian population of Gaza, which is what would need to happen in order to correctly apply the term ‘genocide,’” the AJC maintains. “Israel’s leaders have repeatedly asserted that their campaign in Gaza is solely against the terrorist organization Hamas.”

Well, not all Israeli leaders say as much. If they don’t want to kill Palestinians, they at least want to drive them out.

“We must promote a solution to encourage the emigration of the residents of Gaza,” far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in 2024. And far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a position in the Defense Ministry, says that Israel “will rule there. And in order to rule there securely for a long time, we must have a civilian presence.” In other words, settlements much like those unsettling the West Bank.

And, as Bartov has noted, the big problem for Gazans is they have nowhere to go.

“The big difference between the Nakba of 1948 and what happened in ‘23, ‘24, ‘25 in Gaza is that at the time the borders were open, in ‘48, they could flee. They did flee, to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria,” the Holocaust and genocide scholar said. “In 2023, 2024, Israel, of course, did not open its borders. Egypt did not open its borders, and they had no place to flee. Ethnic cleansing, which was what the Israeli government wanted to carry out, became genocide.”

It’s all reminiscent of “Neighborhood Bully,” 1983 song about Israel by Bob Dylan (nee Zimmerman):

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized

Old women condemned him, said he should apologize

Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad

The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad

He’s the neighborhood bully.

Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim

That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him

‘Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back

And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac

He’s the neighborhood bully.

Of course, Israel is surrounded by bullies who want nothing more than its destruction. Genocide for Israelis would be fine with them.

The synagogue that plans to remove its “We Stand with Israel” message will replace it with rotating banners. Some messages will be seasonal – “Shanah tovah!” around the holidays, for example. Others will be general, such as “BZBI: Where You Belong.” At times, it will display an “Am Yisrael Chai” banner, using a phrase that means “The People of Israel Live.”

“We look forward to having this new communication tool,” the rabbi wrote. “Rather than live under one banner, we will return again and again to davar acher, a new idea, a new approach.” That may accommodate several opinions.

Of course, it’s not clear what opinions will guide Israel’s future over time.

“Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is,” Bartov argues. “The state of Israel has to be reinvented, and it cannot be reinvented according to this ethnonationalist principle that has taken hold of it.… Israel, as a society, there has to be a society of all its citizens. As it was said at the time, in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, Eretz Kol Ezracheha, a country of all its citizens.”

About that pot and kettle

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Joe Weber

“Projection” abounds in the Trump era

Joseph Weber

Anna and Sigmund Freud, source: Deutschlandfunk

In the mid-1890s, Sigmund Freud pioneered the psychological insight of “projection.” His daughter, Anna, refined the concept in the 1930s. But, with what seems to be the third attempt on Donald J. Trump’s life, their understanding couldn’t be more relevant than ever today.

The Freuds’s notion was that people sometimes defend their own egos by projecting their unacceptable views or urges onto others. For instance, a married man attracted to a female coworker might accuse her of flirting with him. Or a woman wrestling with the urge to steal convinces herself that others are trying to break into her home.

In the Trump era, projection abounds, it seems. It’s not self-dealing by the Trump family that is corrupt, but rather the Joseph Biden “crime family.” The GOP efforts to restrict voting don’t threaten democracy, but rather “mail-in cheating” and other alleged election flaws are at fault.

Nowadays, such projection in Trump’s Washington is so common as to rarely draw comment. But it is disappointing when the phenomenon appears in reputable publications, especially those that often otherwise provide substantial critical reporting about the White House.

Consider, sadly, The Wall Street Journal. Amid the instant analyses of the shootings at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a few comments on the paper’s editorial page stand out. Violent actions and extreme rhetoric by Trump are not at fault in the fever swamp that is the mind of the self-styled “friendly federal assassin,” the paper suggests. Rather, it’s the fault of unnamed politicians and journalists.

Referring to “the poison that too often passes for American political discourse these days,” the Journal takes to task the “life or death terms” in which it suggests politics are miscast now. In such a heated environment, the editorialists hold, “the mentally unstable convince themselves of their own righteous cause.”

And the solution? “We need our political and media classes to stop talking and writing in apocalyptic terms and restore reason to political debates,” the WSJ contends. “We need to revive the traditional moral line that violence is unacceptable.”

No one would argue with the latter sentiment, of course. The attempts on Trump’s life — and this one appears to be the third, even as this shooter’s targets remain murky — are just as reprehensible as earlier assaults on Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. They are just as loathsome as the tragically successful assassination of John F. Kennedy and several occupants of the White House long before him — assaults that occurred in eras far less polarized than today.

But is the problem really media overstatement? This at a time when American forces are being deployed abroad ostensibly to forestall nuclear war? When they grab up foreign leaders and kill alleged but unproven drug dealers? When domestic forces murder American protesters while rounding up and warehousing tens of thousands of immigrants?

And who, after all, is responsible for talking in apocalyptic and violent terms? Who, more than anyone, has corrupted our political discourse for the last decade? Who has debased the language of Washington more than any president in recent history?

Just consider a few of Trump’s comments:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social on April 5. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

At an October 2024 campaign event, Trump said of former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it … when the guns are trained on her face.”

A short time before, at a September rally, he proposed a crackdown by police to deal with crime. “If you had one really violent day … one rough hour—and I mean real rough—the word will get out, and it will end immediately,” he argued.

A bit more than a year earlier, at a March 2023 gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee, he said: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

In June 2020, with protesters outside the White House, he said: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” This appears in a memoir by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

And all those are consistent with other comments by Trump. “I would bring back waterboarding,” he said in a 2016 Republican primary debate. And I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” And, when a protester disrupted a Las Vegas rally of his that year, Trump said: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

As The Atlantic noted in a long 2024 compendium of Trump’s most inflammatory comments, Trump accused his opponents of inspiring the attacks against him with their rhetoric. “The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record—singular among American presidents of the modern era—of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition,” the outlet remarked.

Classic projection, it seems. And, of course, his incendiary comments have had results. Just look at the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, something his administration is busily trying to rewrite.

In a 2020 edition of Perspectives on Terrorism, a respected peer-reviewed academic journal, three scholars dissected Trump’s language during his first term. Political discourse in the period “became more hateful and divisive,” they noted.

And they laid the fault at the feet of the president, saying his enemies were those most often victimized.

“Threats and actual violence against groups and individuals singled out and demonized by Trump increased,” the scholars wrote. “The targets of his verbal attacks were most of all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the news media collectively and individual journalists, and well-known politicians, mostly Democrats…. We found that contrary to an old children’s rhyme (‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’) Trump’s aggressive, divisive, and dehumanizing language was seconded by his followers and inflicted directly or indirectly psychological and physical harm to Trump’s declared enemies.”

Of course, this has continued during Trump II and has moved far beyond language.

“There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers,” Robert Reich, a former official in the administrations of Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, noted in a Substack. “Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington.”

Another former government official, David Rothkopf, did not hold back in delivering his own heated language about Trump in his Substack. Like Reich, Rothkopf has bipartisan cred. He served in the Clinton Administration and also worked as a managing director of Kissinger Associates.

Dissecting the president’s press performance after the aborted dinner, Rothkopf argued that “the con man, serial sex abuser, war criminal, racist, misogynist, immoral, most corrupt president in U.S. history became Saint Donald, the MAGA martyr.”

Arguing that no president in modern history has done more the promote division or violence in the U.S. than Trump, he laid the blame for today’s corrosive atmosphere at the president’s feet. “If America has a culture of violence, he is this country’s principle [sic] Apostle of Violence—a promoter of gun culture, hate and lawlessness,” he wrote. “What is more, we all know it. We know it. We can see it. It is woven into the fabric of our daily lives.”

There’s no doubt that the political atmosphere has coarsened and grown superheated ever since Trump descended his escalator in 2015 and defamed immigrants as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. And there’s no question that under Trump’s provocations, critics respond with strident language – one might even say “apocalyptic terms,” per the WSJ.

But put the blame where it belongs. It’s not the media, which serves as Trump’s messenger, albeit however critically. It’s the message.

Moreover, a deranged man who seems to have grown unhinged by Trump’s policies and sexual history is at fault here. Was he motivated by our vile political atmosphere? In time, we may learn more about what drove him and whether the Net-driven nastiness in the zeitgeist contributed.

If we want to change that atmosphere, though, the best place to start may be in the November midterm elections. Following up with a more civil alternative to Trump in the presidential vote two years later could also help.

Certainly, it is long beyond time for the projection practiced by Trump and his minions — and bought by too many in the press and outside — to end.

Alex P. Keaton was delightful …

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Joe Weber

… but Nebraska’s version isn’t quite so endearing

Joseph Weber

Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton, source: Instagram

In the 1980s, Michael J. Fox earned his acting spurs in “Family Ties,” a sitcom in which he played Alex P. Keaton, the right-wing young son of a pair of ex-hippies. Throughout the show’s seven-season run, the buttoned-down tie-wearing character clung to Reagan-style conservatism.

But Fox in 2020 said Keaton would have shunned Donald J. Trump. George W. Bush or Mitt Romney might have flown, perhaps, but not Trump.

I’m reminded of this because Robert B. “Bob” Evnen, a fellow we knew in Lincoln, Nebraska, was something of a Keaton-like figure to his family. While Bob’s family consisted mostly of liberal Jews, he took a different path. An attorney schooled at the liberal-leaning Gould School of Law at USC, he became a fire-breathing MAGA-backing rightist who got quite active in Nebraska Republican politics.

One longtime friend of his family once bemoaned Bob’s turn from his family’s values. How could this black sheep have gone so far astray, she wondered?

But Bob’s shift certainly paid off for him professionally. He won election as Nebraska’s Secretary of State first in 2018 and again in 2022. He’s now seeking a third term, with three candidates – one Republican and two Democrats – vying to take his job in a May 12 primary. He recently emailed me, seeking my vote, even though, as a resident of Colorado now, I no longer vote in Nebraska.

Not that he’d get my vote anyway.

Bob is a fascinating study in how enablers of Donald J. Trump – often otherwise bright people – contort themselves so they can ride on the coattails of the president and other highly placed Trump toadies. They do so despite facts and logic, sometimes despite their own experiences.

They do so, perhaps, because opportunism pays off.

For instance, Bob won the state post in 2018 championing requirements that voters in Nebraska show identification in order to vote. Never mind that the numbers on voter fraud in the state – and nationally for that matter – were and continue to be minuscule.

One group that tracks such voter fraud cases listed just two Nebraska men who voted twice in 2016, each once by mail and once in person. No cases were listed for any other year except 2020, when three members of one family voted in one county while living in another.

In that 2020 Nebraska case, prosecutors said the family patriarch had become angry with the village board in a nearby community where he owned several properties but didn’t live. The board had passed an ordinance pertaining to junk on lots and nuisance properties. The man, who presumably voted against the board candidates, was fined $10,000 while his son and daughter-in-law got probation.

Voter ID, which Nebraskans endorsed by ballot question in 2022 and which was enacted into law in mid-2023, may have prevented the man from voting. Indeed, on its face, voter ID seems as reasonable as requiring a driver’s license or some other photo identification to buy booze or fly.

Bob claims he wrote the state’s voter ID law, by the way, though it appears that a few more folks were involved. His staff and a legislative committee, for instance, had their hands in.

Of course, facts are slippery things with MAGA folks. More important, as the League of Women Voters noted, the issue is that time and time again, voter photo ID laws have proven ineffective in fighting voter fraud — in the rare instances it does take place.

“While voter photo ID laws aim to prevent in-person voter impersonation, an almost non-existent form of voter fraud, other types of voter impersonation are similarly rare and not cause for significant concern,” the league reported. “According to the Brennan Center, the rate of in-person voter impersonation is extremely low: only 0.00004% of all ballots cast. It’s worth noting that this rate is even significantly lower than other rare forms of voter fraud, such as absentee ballot fraud, which voter photo ID laws do not address.”

Indeed, the league traced the history of such efforts as voter ID laws back to the Jim Crow era in the South. That was “when many states employed various tactics — including literacy tests, poll taxes, and extralegal measures such as violence and intimidation — to prevent Black Americans from voting. Following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, many of these tactics were outlawed, but efforts to restrict voting access persisted, including implementing voter ID laws.”

Voter ID measures also restrict voting by Native American communities, low-income, elderly, and rural voters, according to the league. “This is partially because photo IDs aren’t as common as many people assume: 18 percent of all citizens over the age of 65, 16 percent of Latino voters, 25 percent of Black voters, and 15 percent of low-income Americans lack acceptable photo ID.”

But, on the right, fraudulent voting remains a hot-button issue. That’s chiefly because Trump – egomaniac that he is – could not believe that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Even today, he espouses the lie that really he won.

In a laughable case of “how far right can I be?,” Bob Evnen faced a couple Republican opponents in the 2022 primary who attacked the integrity of the vote in Nebraska in 2020. His state post then included ensuring an honest election.

Both of Bob’s opponents had based their campaigns on claims that the state’s vote-counting machines had been compromised, the Nebraska Examiner reported. They argued that fraudulent voting had occurred on Bob’s watch. Both questioned whether Biden had truly won an electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where he outpolled Trump by more than 22,000 votes.

But Bob, a former general counsel for the Nebraska Republican Party, maintained that he had fully investigated all the claims by the two and by a group called the Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project and found no validity to any of them, the news outlet reported.

Had Bob faced just one of the other GOP primary contenders, it’s an open question whether he would have won. Together, the two garnered just over 56 percent of the party vote, though they split the voting with smaller shares each, of course, leaving Bob to prevail with just under 44 percent of his party’s support.

Ah, the delicious irony. What goes around comes around, eh Bob? Of course, he coasted to success in the fall 2022 general election in heavily red Nebraska with no opposition from Democrats or others.

But this is a drum that even today Bob keeps beating, usually as he marches in lockstep with Trump. For instance, he praised a presidential executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” as opening “a new and hopeful chapter.”

Trump signed the executive order in late March of last year, aligning it with a House Republican priority to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship in federal elections. While the House passed that act, it is expected to die in the Senate.

Election watchdogs have said that some MAGA Republicans base their contentions about fraud at the ballot box on the “myth” of widespread voting by non-citizens. That’s so even though the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, analyzed election conduct from 2000 to 2025 and found just 99 instances nationally of noncitizens voting out of hundreds of millions of votes cast.

Still, this bogeyman remains one Bob is happy to raise, even as he lets in just a smidge of daylight between himself and Trump. “It’s very important that we assure ourselves that non-citizens are not voting,” Bob recently said. “But we don’t need to nationalize elections to do it.”

Apparently concerned about that sliver of daylight seeming too bright, in his email he assured me – and others he sent the note to – that “The President and I are Completely In-Sync on Mail-In Voting,” another of Trump’s hobbyhorses. Trump rode that pony with a second executive order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

Bob likes this one a lot. He said it would “require each state to send the Postal Service a list of those who have requested early ballots. As soon as the Postal Service is ready to put this into effect, we will immediately provide the list of Nebraska early voters, which already is publicly available under Nebraska state law. The Postal Service will then be responsible for making sure that it returns early ballots only for those voters on that list.”

Imagine how efficiently that all would work.

But you don’t have to imagine that, since the Brennan Center at NYU’s School of Law did so already: “If implemented, the executive order would inject chaos into our elections, block eligible American citizens from voting, undermine voter privacy, and expose election officials and others to criminal prosecution simply for doing their jobs,” the center reported.

Oh, and recall that Trump has himself voted by mail, including just recently. Still, he calls it “mail-in cheating.”

But such measures all fall under what a former journalist and longtime observer of Nebraska politics, Steve Smith, calls “the Integrity Narrative.” Smith, who directs communications for The Good Life Institute, writes that this narrative “opens with a claim that the system needs protection. It then builds a tool to measure risk. Finally, it closes with a report that appears to confirm the original concern. Each step feels reasonable; all told, they shape how voters are treated in real time.”

Of course, the ultimate game is to drive down voter participation in a bid to help Republicans.

“It helps to ask a simple question,” Smith adds. “What problem is this system solving? Claims about widespread illegal voting always end up being debunked, overblown, or downright fictional.”

Still, such issues offer opportunists their chances to shine and to cozy up to people in power. A decade ago, Bob distinguished himself in Nebraska politics — and won over the heart of then-Gov. and now Sen. Pete Ricketts — by co-founding and leading a 2016 drive that successfully reinstated the death penalty in the state. The state legislature had abolished it.

“Capital punishment is the only penalty that is repeated in all five of the Books of Moses,” Bob told a group of Omaha Republicans. “The Old Testament is composed of three parts. The five Books of Moses, the Prophets and the Writings. The Five Books of Moses, in each of those five books you’ll find capital punishment is prescribed for certain crimes. And so we begin with capital punishment is morally required.”

“Required?” Never mind that a famous passage in the Mishnah, an early collection of traditional writings, cites a religious court’s view that one execution in 70 years was considered destructive. Or that the rabbis in the Talmud fashioned legal hurdles that made the death penalty exceedingly rare — something Bob as a knowledgeable Jewish person should have known.

Sounds a bit like JD Vance, the Catholic convert, telling the pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Ah, the hubris of MAGA, from the top on down.

Since Bob’s death-penalty effort paid off, Nebraska has executed one man, Carey Dean Moore. Moore killed two Omaha cab drivers in 1979, when he was 21. He was sentenced to die, but the decree was twice reversed and then stayed in 2007, when Nebraska’s Supreme Court had reservations about electrocution, and again in 2011, that time over concerns about lethal injections. After 38 years on death row, Moore was killed by injection in 2018.

Moore’s death drew the ire of death-penalty opponents.

They included Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun whose novel about a Louisiana execution was made into the movie “Dead Man Walking.” Prejean pilloried Ricketts over his championing of the death penalty. “‘An important tool,’ Gov. Ricketts calls it,” Prejean said. “A tool for what? To show that we’re capable as a state of imitating the worst possible violence under the worst possible conditions, the most pre-meditated death of a human being you can imagine?”

“What’s going to happen after the execution … is anybody really safer? Has it really helped the state? All these things come to mind when I think of this and what’s about to happen in Nebraska,” she said. “Nothing will be accomplished by it, and that’s hardly what you call pro-life.”

By the way, Bob proudly claims to be pro-life, too. Never mind the moral and intellectual inconsistency – as one might politely call it – of advocating state-sponsored killing while calling oneself pro-life.

Inconsistency – perhaps we might call it hypocrisy — isn’t a problem for many MAGA Republicans, though. They claim they are furthering democracy with their efforts to restrict voting. They argue that gerrymandering is fine in Texas, but not in blue states. And they back a philandering felon’s invocations of law and order when his minions murder protesters in Minnesota.

So, Bob, Alex P. Keaton was entertaining and appealing in the 1980s. But your version of him just isn’t all that charming. I won’t be voting for you, volunteering or donating to your reelection bid. As your president might say, thank you for your attention to this matter.

Divinely ordained?

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

In a flap between Trump and the pope, guess who takes the high road

Joseph Weber

Henry VIII meets Anne Boleyn, source: World History Encyclopedia

Popes and kings have often rubbed one another the wrong way.

Consider Henry VIII. When Catherine of Aragon couldn’t produce a male heir for the obese British king, he grew infatuated with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII stalled for years on granting a divorce. So, the monarch broke with the Roman church, appointed a Protestant clergyman as the Archbishop of Canterbury, got his divorce from him and married the heavily pregnant Anne.

Then, in 1534, Parliament passed a law making Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England. The randy ruler also soon had Boleyn beheaded and married four more times. The fates of the six were not happy: “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” For his sins, Clement’s successor excommunicated Henry in 1538 and the king died nine years later.

Three centuries earlier, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II went to war twice against papal armies, battling them in 1229 and 1230 and again in the 1240s. Pope Gregory IX had excommunicated Frederick a couple times and taken his lands in Italy while the king was off on crusades. His successor, Pope Innocent IV, later again excommunicated the emperor. In their war of words, the popes called Frederick “the antichrist,” and he, in turn, labeled Innocent the same, adding that the pope’s name was “the mark of the beast,” arguing that his initials equaled the Roman letters for the Satanic 666.

So, in comparison, the contretemps between the obese would-be monarch, Donald J. Trump, and Pope Leo XIV seems like small beer. Certainly, it’s as paltry and petty as Trump himself, who demonstrated his anger, irrationality and knack for non-sequiturs as he took on the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics in a Truth Social post.

While Trump hurled personal insults, calling Leo “WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and accusing him of “catering to the Radical Left,” the pope preferred to take a higher road. Speaking to reporters at the beginning of a 10-day tour to four African nations, Leo said: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel. And that’s what I believe I am called here to do.”

Leo said he had “no intention to debate” Trump. “I am not a politician,” he told reporters, as he defended his earlier remarks asking the world to end “the madness of war.” He added: “The message is the same: to promote peace.”

The pope did offer a slight jab, however. When he was asked specifically about Trump’s comments on Truth Social, Leo said: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

For all the small-mindedness in Trump’s blast, though, what is astonishing – if consistent – is his egocentrism. It’s all – and always – about him, of course.

Leo, the first American-born pope, was chosen by the global College of Cardinals last May not because he headed the worldwide Augustinian order of priests or because he is an expert on canon law who taught as a seminary professor while ministering in Peru for a decade. No, according to Trump, the now-70-year-old was “a shocking surprise” who owes his appointment to Trump.

“He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump,” the president posted. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

The pope, Trump added, should be “thankful” to him – though this randy and often-philandering royal wannabe made it clear he doesn’t “want” the Chicago-born pontiff leading the Church (as if he has the say-so).

“And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

Never mind that Trump was elected his second time with less than half the popular vote, 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent for Kamala Harris, a margin of less than 2.3 million votes. And just what crime and stock markets have to do with the pope is a mystery, one perhaps clear only in Trump’s unsettled mind.

Leo, for his part, has avoided direct criticism of Trump in most of his admonitions about the president’s military adventurism.

In his opening months as pontiff, he quietly dodged an early invitation from Trump to visit Washington. But in January, Leo delivered a speech voicing concern about the Trump administration’s capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

As The New York Times reported, his admonishments on the war in Iran have grown more pointed as the conflict has continued, and as Trump administration officials began invoking theology to justify the war that Trump ordered up.

First, he appeared sour on efforts by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to portray the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran as a Christian mission. Hegseth, a supporter of a peculiar Christian sect, asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

The pope saw things differently. In a homily during a Mass on the Thursday morning before Easter, the pope said that the Christian mission had often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”

Then, on Easter Sunday, he renewed his call for peace. “On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars,” Leo told tens of thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

“We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared,” the pope said at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the bishop of Rome. “God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.”

In late March the pope warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

After Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran, the pope said that “this threat against the whole population of Iran” was “really not acceptable.” He urged citizens to contact their political leaders to ask them to “to work for peace and to reject war always.”

As the Times noted, Trump’s angry reaction to the soft-spoken Leo, who was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, showed “how differently two of the world’s most powerful Americans handle conflict.” The paper noted: “One pleads for resolution, while the other reflexively increases the temperature.”

While the pope mostly kept his comments focused on issues, Trump has preferred to make them personal.

“I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA,” the president posted. “He gets it, and Leo doesn’t!”

Lou Prevost, the eldest brother of the pope, has repeatedly praised Trump in online posts, applauding his attacks on the trans community and the Democratic Party, and once even shared a video that referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “c–t.”

“These f—ing liberals crying about tariffs is just unreal,” read the caption under the video, posted by someone else and reported on by the Daily Beast. “Do they not know that there is a thing called video? Just listen to what this drunk c— has to say in the mid-90’s long before her husband had grindr dates.”

Prevost’s efforts, first noted by the Daily Beast last May 2025, quickly earned him an invitation to the White House, and to a Mar-a-Lago bash hosted by the president in December.

But today some of Trump’s latest postings are not sitting well with others in the MAGA base, as The Washington Post reported. Several were offended by Trump’s post of an image depicting him in Christ-like robes, holding a glowing orb and blessing an ailing man.

“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” wrote Megan Basham, a prominent conservative Protestant Christian writer and commentator. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”

The president has since had the image removed.

Isabel Brown, a Catholic podcaster with the Daily Wire outlet and a conservative influencer allied with the Trump White House, also spoke out against it. “This post is, frankly, disgusting and unacceptable, but also a profound misreading of the American people experiencing a true and beautiful revival of faith in Christ in the midst of our broken culture,” Brown wrote.

David Brody, an evangelical journalist with the Christian Broadcasting Network, blasted the image, as the Times reported. “This goes too far. It crosses the line,” Brody wrote on social media. “A supporter can back the mission AND reject this simultaneously.”

The newspaper also noted that Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Catholic Democrat from the Detroit suburbs, called the image “deeply offensive and disrespectful.” She added: “This is not a matter of politics or humor — it touches the core of our faith. Our Lord represents humility, sacrifice, compassion, empathy and truth. Everything he is not.”

After Pope Francis died last spring, Trump kicked up similar dust when he posted an image of himself as pontiff. He had a ready answer when reporters asked who he would like to take the job in Rome, according to the Times. “I’d like to be pope,” he joked to reporters at the White House. “That would be my number one choice.”

Source: Truth Social, via The New York Times

For the notoriously humorless Trump – now clearly stung by Pope Leo — the joke was likely more than half-serious.

The Big Picture

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Alex P. Keaton was delightful …

… but Nebraska’s version isn’t quite so endearing

Divinely ordained?

In a flap between Trump and the pope, guess who takes the high road