Spring '26
Episode 3
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. – Karl Marx
As if on cue, there was JD Vance attempting to school Pope Leo on the theology of just war. Delicious. Even more absurd than his attempt months earlier to explain how Catholic theology justified taking care of your family first while ignoring the suffering of others. I had to laugh, and laughter felt good. Black comedy. The neophyte Catholic scolding the Pope that he should “be careful” when talking about theology, a Pope who had been the leader of the Augustinians no less.1 “Bless his heart” as they’d say here in the South.
Trump was much worse, of course, blasting the Pope as being “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” “[H]e thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” His profane Easter Sunday post, threatening devastation if Iran didn’t “open the Fuckin’ strait” wasn’t comic and I wasn’t laughing. It even shocked some of those conservative Catholics who’d deftly been making excuses thus far. Two days later came, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”. That day it felt as if the whole world was watching the clock, waiting to see if this was really the red line or if, as he had done so many times before, Trump would back off at the last minute. When he did, the sigh of relief brought with it a sense that something fundamental had changed. That Trump would continue to bluster and bully, and he would certainly be dangerous as long as he was in office, but that he had hit the limit and the bloody imp of hubris was now punching back.
He’d been stymied by Minneapolis. The earlier confrontations between ICE and the protesters in Los Angeles had ended in a draw, so he sent ICE Barbie roaring in while he ranted about Somali fraud, determined to have her make a big show and perhaps draw out the kind of violence from the protesters that would give him leave to unleash the crackdown he was so clearly itching for. But the protesters remained peaceful and resolute, the President’s thugs showed their true colors, and citizen videos demonstrated the extent of the administration’s lies about the murders of Good and Pretti. Trump backed down. A note of hope started to gleam in the daily missives coming from the resistance.
It’s not that Trump changed course. If anything, he was becoming more belligerent. But there was an element of panic in that Easter post that I hadn’t sensed before. Frustrated with the domestic roadblocks, he was spending more time looking for triumphs overseas. The kidnapping of Maduro emboldened him. His earlier bombing run into Iran had gone well, had given his approvals a bump. Netanyahu had been on him for months after the Iran raid to “finish the job.”
It was an easy sell. Trump had begun to speak of himself as the most powerful person in the world. He wasn’t wrong. In fewer than fifteen months he had shifted the international balances of power, reshaped the position of the United States in the world, and torn up the vestiges of the Great Society in ways that would not be easily undone. These were seismic changes, and however things played out from here, there would be no going back to the way the world and the country had been. He was convinced he could do anything. Chosen by God. Nothing to stop him but his “own morality”.2 No wonder he thought he could take on the Pope.
When I saw the first reports of the attacks on Tehran, it was like watching a cheesy horror flick where the clueless heroine decides to investigate that noise thumping from the basement. “Don’t go there!” you shout, giggling nervously and throwing popcorn at the screen. Because you know that she will. And you (and everyone else who’s watching) knows what happens next.
Of course Iran fought back tenaciously. Of course they blocked the Strait of Hormuz. Of course the new leadership, replacing those who’d been killed in the initial attacks, was more radical and hostile. An assault on Iran had been war-gamed for decades and every time it came up a very bad idea indeed, which is why no previous President had been persuaded to take it on. But Trump, ever disdainful of expertise, easily flattered by the diabolical Bibi Netanyahu, ludicrously confident in his own gut, walked right into it with no clear plan for what he wanted to achieve or how to get out if things went bad. Which they very quickly did.
As the stalemate continued and a shaky cease-fire dragged on, Trump’s daily pronouncements became more erratic. The war was over already, all objectives having been achieved. Or negotiations were ongoing and the war would be over very soon. Or it wasn’t a war at all. Or it was a war but had been paused. One day there was a plan to escort ships through the Strait, the next day that plan was abandoned, Trump announcing the shift at almost the same time his Secretary of State was in Europe defending the plan.
Nonetheless, despite rising inflation, economic disarray, a stalemate in his war of choice, and a 3rd assassination attempt (he said he was honored), the President remained laser focused on the nation’s most critical need – his big beautiful ballroom. No matter what question was asked of him about the war, or the Epstein files, or his papal spat, or the economy, he would find a way to come back to talking about the ballroom and the other grotesque vanity projects he was littering around DC.
The assassination attempt at the WHCD3 proved the need for that ballroom, he claimed. This ignored the fact that it’s a private event and would never have been held at the White House in any case, but it gave the lemmings in Congress leave to get on the ballroom bandwagon and start clamoring for a one billion dollar allocation for the ballroom’s security. It was nothing to do with security and everything to do with currying favor.4
Laughing at the absurdities (Ka$h Patel’s FBI-branded bourbon, anyone?) didn’t make the realities any less grim, but it made it all more livable. After a year of daily head-snapping outrage, people needed to find some balance, remembering that it was alright to spend some time turned away from the shitshow, remembering that it was okay to find joy and purpose and meaning in the interstices of daily life. Seeing Trump ensnared by his own foolishness, raging at the obstreperousness of his opponents, was a soft breeze of fresh air.
In the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole examined the notion that Trump’s “craziness” was originally a bargaining strategy, but had gradually elided into the real thing. His profane rant on Easter morning wasn’t the crafty move of someone trying to keep their opponent off balance, but the truly unhinged raving of someone who had lost his grip on reality (whatever that grip had been). Calls for invoking the 25th amendment were increasingly common, although there seemed no likelihood of that happening. More likely was impeachment if the Democrats gained the House at the midterms, but even in the most optimistic scenarios for the Senate, there wouldn’t be enough votes to convict. So what would be the point?
I found that my views on deposing Trump (one way or another) had shifted. For a long time I’d felt removing Trump would just make things worse. A President Vance would pursue essentially the same policies, but more efficiently and with a stronger push in the direction of the Christianists. That calculus changed with Trump’s blunder into Iran. The “stable genius” had become too erratic. Too many lives were being lost. Still, unless there were bigger changes in the Senate than could reasonably be expected, impeachment by a newly emboldened House would be a waste of time and energy. There’d be too much else that needed tending.
By early May the political pundits’ attentions were focused on the midterms, just six months away. ‘Twas the season of gerrymandering. What chilled me most was how blatant the partisanship had become. No more pretending that there was any fairness at the root of it. Texas started it and other red states picked it up. Then the blues, in defense. Abandoning the practice of redistricting only every ten years following the new census, legislatures were carving states up to ensure that their party’s voters were the majority in every district. The Supreme Court had “clarified” that unless complainants could prove that the intent of the redistricting was to marginalize black voters, the new districts did not violate the Voting Rights Act. Since such proof was impossible, in practical terms, the legislators could rely on partisanship, which had already been deemed constitutional. If the result was the loss of representation for certain minority populations, that was not a result that the courts need consider.
In February, Lynn and I had gone to a talk by Jon Meacham, the historian and biographer. He was on tour for his latest book, American Struggle.5 The gist of Meacham’s talk was that the throughline of American history had always been the struggle between those who worked, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, to make the country more inclusive and more egalitarian, and those who fought to maintain a hierarchy of privilege. And every time those tensions had boiled to a head, the egalitarians had won. Eventually. While he was optimistic that the current crisis would work out the same, what worried him the most was the growing distrust in the electoral process. Once enough people believe the elections are corrupt and refuse to accept the results, the rock on which democracy rests starts to crumble.6
Saddest to me was the realization that 21year old Josie7 couldn’t be proud of her country. She was planning a European trip with Lynn and her Mom for the fall and worried about how she’d be treated, wishing there was an easy way to let people know “I’m not one of them!” She was going on four when Obama was first elected, and I thrilled at the thought that by the time she was 12, it would be normal for the President to be Black. And maybe a woman after that! Alas, for half her life the national scene had been dominated by Trump. And Trump’s America was nothing to be proud of. For all of my dismay at the Trump years, and all of my awareness of the nation’s failures, I continued to be a proud citizen, remembering how much good had been done under our flag, still convinced that we’d done more good than harm and that our (potential) greatness outweighed our disasters. From Josie’s perspective it was all disaster.
As the war entered its fourth month, the cease-fire was holding, barely, despite occasional bursts of bombing from either side. Trump continued to bluster and threaten, but his boasts held less power. He’d boxed himself in, had few cards left to play.8 The latest polls showed 70% of the public disapproved of his handling of the economy. Asked if the financial struggles of millions of Americans played a part in his attempts to end the war, he said, “Not even a little bit”. At a Cabinet meeting, asked about the impact of the war on the midterm elections, he said, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Republicans in Congress, struggling to find a message to bring to their voters, hung their heads in despair.
He did care, very much, about the judge’s scathing decision to have his name removed from the Kennedy Center, launching a long TruthSocial screed in which he declared he was “done” with the Kennedy Center and would give it back to Congress. The whining of a kid getting spanked. When the musical acts started dropping out of his planned Great American State Fair he raged that it should just be cancelled, replaced by himself, “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World ..., the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime,” delivering a “major speech, rallying the country forward.” It was embarrassingly pathetic.
Sometimes, Lord help me, I’d catch myself almost feeling sorry for the short fingered vulgarian.9 Just imagine: you’ve dealt your way into becoming the most powerful man on the planet, the most consequential President in history; you compare yourself to Alexander the Great; you’ve surrounded yourself with sycophants and courtiers who will trash every moral fiber they might once have had to do your will; the richest people in history come when you beckon, bringing gifts of gold; and you still can’t stop the late night comics from making fun of you. The fake news keep asking rude questions, no matter how you berate them. They’ve nicknamed you “taco” because they can’t see the brilliance of your dealmaking. You still don’t have the respect that you so nakedly crave. And now the Iranians are calling your bluff and there are MAGA-traitors everywhere and the activist judges keep getting in your way and you’re surrounded by incompetents and this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!
By the end of May, Trump had declared himself “bored” with the Iran negotiations. The bull in the crockery shop was getting weary. You could picture him there, head hung low, steam and mucus dripping from his snout, bleary eyes looking this way and that for another enemy to attempt to trample. His handlers continued to hang around the edges, fearful of the damage those horns could still do. But the shop was still standing, even though the walls had been battered. The bull was capable of doing a lot more damage, but he was clearly weakening.
How deeply damaged must that soul have become, to be so hugely needy, so destructively insecure? I’d read the transcripts of his rants thinking, the Weave is unravelling. The plus side was that I no longer woke each morning filled with dread, no longer felt the need to check the headlines to see what fresh outrage had occurred overnight. I wasn’t numb to it, but it had become normal, and we were still surviving. The chainsaw had gotten jammed. The resistance was growing.
The beginning of June brought a run of those glorious Spring days that make up for the South’s blistering summers. Lynn would come with me to my weekly PT appointments and as we drove into town I’d marvel at the explosion of green that covered the mountains. Even after thirty years I was thrilled by the beauty. My appointments were late afternoon, and rather than battle the rush hour traffic going home, we’d have an early dinner at one of the many downtown restaurants that had popped up in recent years, cementing Birmingham’s reputation as one of the best dining cities in the country. Here, in one of the several bright blue spots in deep red Alabama, the tables held a diverse crowd. You couldn’t always be sure of the political leanings of the people at the table next to you, so caution and politeness ruled, but here and there a word would be dropped, or even a gesture, that would indicate you were among people of a like mind. The Supreme Court had just validated the racist gerrymanders of the Alabama map, but the admirable Doug Jones was running for Governor against the despicable Tommy Tuberville.10 It was a long shot, to be sure, but there was reason to hope that we might catch a bit of the anticipated (hoped for, longed for) blue wave in November.
At home, I’d sit at my writing table, looking out at the lake, now calm after the thunderstorms and tornadoes of previous weeks. I thought about the first time I heard the word “hubris” at a beer & brats picnic in my mid-teens, and how for all of my adult life the imp had been in residence on my shoulder, tugging at my ear, whispering, “you’re not as smart as you think you are”. If the imp or his kin had ever visited Trump, they’d been swatted away, but they were implacable nonetheless.
At lunch with Grover I rattled on about the viciousness of social media, the way it flattens our perceptions of others. We know that we ourselves, and the people we love, are deeply complicated, full of inner contradictions. We struggle to present the best version of ourselves, hoping to hide the selves we don’t want seen. We have an infinite capacity for self-deception. We commit to doing the right thing and then fail a thousand times. We know all that, and yet we easily take one public aspect of another person, one years-old remark, and use that to define them. This one is a Trump supporter and is therefore evil, misogynistic, racist and probably a pedophile. That one opposes Trump and is labelled with Trump Derangement Syndrome, a supporter of Iran’s nuclear ambition, an anti-Semite, and probably a pedophile. Such easy targets these caricatures make.
Trump had made vulgarity acceptable, had celebrated the worst insults and attacks on his opponents, always skirting the line of open calls for violence, dodging behind the claim of “can’t take a joke” while continually adding fuel to the fire of his partisans’ rage. It was going to get worse.
At the beginning of June the streets across the US were mostly calm. The No Kings demonstrations had brought out millions across the country – even here in Alabama the March demonstrations had seen thousands marching at more than 20 sites across the state – but the lack of violence diminished the attention they received. They were important for bonding, for bringing people together, reassuring them that there were millions of others just as disgusted. Their numbers would surely continue to grow.
I didn’t expect the calm to last. The summer was predicted to be the hottest yet. As the elections came closer, passions would boil, tempers would shorten. There’d be people on both far fringes of the political divide aching for a fight. If, as seemed likely, the economy continued to be battered by the effects of Trump’s war, anger would be transmuted into rage. The peaceful resistance would grow, but so would the anger of the most marginalized and disaffected, Trump haters and defenders both.
There would be people in the streets come summer. On my hopeful days I imagined peaceful millions, marching in defense of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. What I feared was the anger and frustration that bleeds violence and mobs, wholesale destruction and retribution. Either way (or just as likely both) there would be people in the streets. I was sure of it.
It was St. Augustine, after all, who initially developed Christian “just war” theory.
Was there ever a more chilling phrase?
White House Correspondents Dinner. “The nerd prom” as the local journalists referred to it.
The ballroom money was stripped from the final bill, another indicator of Trump’s loosening grip.
Which would be a superb textbook for an American Studies AP course.
It should be mentioned that while the context was very serious, Meacham’s presentation was hilarious. Who knew he was such a comedian? If you ever have a chance to see him, by all means, Go!
Who I’ve been writing about since before she was born.
Borowitz joked that Zelensky offered to lend him some.
As Graydon Carter had dubbed him way back in 1988, “just to drive him a little bit crazy”.
Tuberville epitomized the very worst of Republican politicians. Profoundly ignorant, embarrassingly crude, flamboyantly racist, he’d easily won election to the Senate, coasting on his football fame in football-mad Alabama. I imagined he’d been disappointed by the Senate where he didn’t have the seniority or the smarts to get much done (although he was great at getting headlines). I supposed he thought being Governor would be more satisfying.
Your wise words are soothing salve in these chronically irritating days. We will survive.