Last week, Donald Trump posted an image on social media showing much of North America and the surrounding region under the American flag. It followed years of calling Canada the “51st state,” talking about acquiring Greenland, and, more recently, American demands that Canada says threatened its sovereignty and protections for the French language. It arrived amid an immigration policy in which people are not necessarily being returned to their home countries but can instead be sent to third countries, including in Africa. And it came during another round of forced departures among senior military leadership, many without public evidence of wrongdoing.

It is one thing to talk about annexation.

It is another for the president of the United States to circulate a map depicting sovereign nations beneath the American flag.

The map implies an expanded United States. Whether Trump could achieve such a thing, or intends to try, is another question. But if a president puts such an image before the public, we are entitled to consider the world he has asked us to imagine.

And it is not a particularly pleasant exercise for minorities already living within the United States.

Maps make expansion look remarkably simple. Change the colors. Move the borders. Add the flag.

People are more complicated.

If Canada becomes part of the United States, Canadians do not disappear. If Greenland becomes American, Greenlanders do not disappear. Neither do their political institutions, languages, Indigenous communities, immigration laws, health systems, national identities, or ideas about citizenship.

And neither do ours.

If Haitians are denied status here, where do they go in a continent increasingly brought under American authority? We are already sending some immigrants not merely to countries they are not from, but to countries outside even the vastly expanded United States depicted on the president’s map. If Greenland becomes “American,” are Greenlanders automatically citizens? Do they retain their own immigration laws, or does American policy govern them? Would American detention and deportation policies simply extend across the new territory? What happens when people accustomed to government-provided health systems suddenly find themselves governed by a country with an entirely different conception of health care, with the $500 deductible?

These are not objections to a plan. No such plan has been presented.

They are questions raised by the map itself.

A few years ago, observers began wondering why American negotiators increasingly appeared to share Russian assumptions in discussions about Ukraine. Had the United States changed sides?

Perhaps that question was too narrow.

A government willing to treat the sovereignty of allies as negotiable presents a more unsettling question:

What side are many of us allowed to be on?

The map depicts a continent unified beneath a single flag. Recent American policy provides reason to ask what life beneath that flag would mean.

That is the part expansionist imagery tends to leave out.

Territory is not merely land. Canada is not acreage. Greenland is not acreage. Mexico is not acreage. Countries are people — people with governments, languages, histories, rights, expectations, and loyalties of their own.

The United States also brings something to such an imagined union: itself.

It brings an administration sending some immigrants to countries with which they have little or no connection. It brings masked immigration officers and detention centers. It brings a government willing to remove senior military leaders with little public explanation. It brings an increasingly expansive conception of presidential power.

Those things do not establish that Trump intends to annex Canada, Greenland, Mexico, or anywhere else.

But they matter when the president asks the world to look at a map on which those places have effectively become American.

Perhaps there is a coherent strategy behind all of this.

But until it is articulated, what remains visible is not strategy.

It is ambition.

And if we are being asked to imagine a larger America, perhaps the most important question is not where its borders would end.

It is who would be allowed to belong inside them.

After 9/11, like many Americans, I began learning about al-Qaeda and the militant movements that claimed to act in Islam’s name. It was the first time I understood that Islam contains two major branches — Sunni and Shiite — and that their differences are theological, historical, and political. The shock of the attacks produced a crude narrative: “they hate our freedom.”

It was unsettling, and it was woefully incomplete.

Al-Qaeda certainly rejected important aspects of Western society. But its grievances also involved American troops in Saudi Arabia, American policy toward Israel, Iraq, and U.S. support for governments throughout the region. Religion mattered. So did politics, history, nationalism, and power.

Today, most Americans know that Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite, while Saudi Arabia and much of the Arab world are predominantly Sunni. What we still struggle to understand is why the distinction matters — and how much contemporary Sunni-Shiite conflict has been shaped not simply by theology but by geopolitics.

The modern Middle East did not invent the Sunni-Shiite divide. It began with the dispute over succession after Muhammad’s death and acquired profound theological and political meaning over fourteen centuries. But neither can today’s conflicts be explained by an argument that began in the seventh century. Modern borders, colonialism, oil, the Iranian Revolution, dictatorship, foreign intervention, and competition among regional powers have repeatedly given old religious identities new political meaning.

And now, with the war in Iran, those alignments are shifting again as countries confront a conflict not entirely of their making.

Islam, like any religion, can be used for war or for peace. Fundamentalism in any tradition — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or secular — can be weaponized. Religion can help motivate violence without making violence the essence of the religion.

That distinction matters.

ISIS was not pretending to be Islamic. Its adherents believed they were acting according to Islam. Christian extremists who invoke Christianity are not necessarily pretending either. People can sincerely derive terrible ideas from religious texts. But one person’s interpretation does not define a faith for everyone else who practices it.

The Qur’an, like the Bible, contains passages that can be read as peaceful or warlike. History, circumstance, leadership, and the reader himself help determine which passages become important.

And nearly two billion Muslims do what Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists, and almost everyone else does most days: go to work, raise children, worry about money, complain about government, celebrate holidays, fall in love, and try to live their lives.

We tend to forget all of this when religion provides a convenient explanation for our enemies.

Saudi Arabia is a revealing example. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has long been associated with an exceptionally conservative form of Sunni Islam. And the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi hardly suggested a liberalizing respect for dissent.

Yet the United States has maintained a close strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia, including under President Trump.

Apparently Islam explains the conduct of our enemies more readily than it explains the conduct of our friends.

That should tell us something.

Foreign policy does not actually divide the Middle East into Muslims and non-Muslims. It divides countries according to interests, alliances, resources, security, and power. Religion suddenly becomes a comprehensive explanation when it is useful to make it one.

The same inconsistency appears at home.

A Muslim following sharia in his personal religious life is no more inherently a threat to the Constitution than a Catholic following canon law or an Orthodox Jew following halakha. The constitutional problem begins when anyone attempts to use the power of government to impose religious law on others.

And that standard applies to Christians too.

Freedom of religion is a good thing. Inevitably, it permits people to believe things the rest of us find strange, misguided, or even offensive. That is part of the bargain. A free society does not protect only religions whose doctrines receive majority approval.

Nor are majority-Muslim countries inherently threats to world peace. Governments can be dangerous. Leaders can exploit religious identity. Extremists can manipulate scripture. Religious populations can embrace intolerant ideas. None of that should be ignored simply because we are trying to avoid prejudice.

But neither should nearly two billion people inherit responsibility for the most frightening people who claim their faith.

Religion can inspire extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty. So can nationalism, ideology, race, and political power. Islam deserves neither a special exemption from scrutiny nor a special presumption of guilt.

When a Muslim commits violence, we should be willing to ask what role his religion played. But we should also ask about politics, history, grievance, nationalism, power, and the people who taught him what his religion required.

We routinely grant ourselves that complexity.

Muslims deserve it too.

Defending Islam does not require pretending that nothing terrible has ever been done in its name.

It requires refusing to make nearly two billion people answer for everyone who has.

Often, when talking politics, someone will say that I worry about Donald Trump too much. Yes, he is a lot, they concede, but why does he trigger you? Why the obsession?

It is an interesting way to frame the discussion, because it shifts the focus from the presidency to me. And I would argue that we are all poorer when a president spends much of his time on social media, attacks the press and allies, starts wars overseas, concentrates power among corporations and government, and fosters unrest in our cities through an aggressive immigration policy. There is more, of course — the East Wing, the self-dealing, the racism, the coins, the sexism, the voter intimidation, the market manipulation, the monuments.

But the question remains: how does any of this actually affect me, beyond making the news unpleasant to watch?

Let me try to be concrete.

I left a comfortable interest rate to downsize into the suburbs before the election, assuming I would refinance when rates fell. They haven’t fallen the way I expected. Tariffs, extraordinary federal spending and wars have complicated the inflation and interest-rate picture. At least some of that is Trump. Maybe some is just the market.

Either way, my mortgage payment is quite real.

Everything feels more expensive. The other day I went to the grocery store for a few items — sixty dollars. I filled my gas tank — slightly more.

My daughter, a senior, wants to attend the University of Virginia, where I went for undergrad and law school, and where my son also studied. I’ve given to UVA for thirty years. Trump’s administration has gone after universities aggressively, and UVA has hardly been spared. The Justice Department investigated the university, and President Jim Ryan ultimately resigned amid federal pressure. Admissions have changed as well. Application readers no longer see an applicant’s race, ethnicity, or family connection to UVA.

My daughter can still get in, of course. But a family relationship with an institution that has stretched across decades no longer enters the calculation.

And please do not tell me this represents some newfound national commitment to merit. Pete Hegseth was placed in charge of one of the largest and most important bureaucracies in the world without ever having run an organization remotely comparable to it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not a physician, was placed in charge of the nation’s sprawling health bureaucracy after a career primarily in law and advocacy. Businessmen and relatives are conducting sensitive diplomacy. Whatever arguments one makes for those appointments, this administration has hardly established merit as an inviolable principle of public life.

I sell eDiscovery services in the legal space, much of it tied to merger enforcement. When companies hesitate to do deals, or the enforcement environment becomes unpredictable, that reaches my desk eventually.

Or fails to reach it.

I have watched it happen.

I am Black and my wife is white, and my son looks as though he could be Dominican or Venezuelan. My family has been here since before 1800 — most unhappily — and my wife’s family largely the same, with some Eastern Europeans arriving in the 1870s.

But masked federal agents do not do nuance.

When my son goes downtown, he dresses professionally and keeps a scanned copy of his birth certificate on his phone. Hopeful that it’s enough.

I have never believed that we vote solely based on narrow self-interest. Democracy partly depends on our not doing so. I have always held broader ideals: freedom, equality, civil rights for all, a country that does not bully its neighbors, leadership that respects the dignity of every person without identifying them by where they were born.

Perhaps attacks on Black history and civil rights do not personally injure me. Perhaps watching Black officers in the military dismissed without clear cause does not directly harm my household.

I believe they do. They certainly demoralize my kids.

But I also now have a personal scorecard.

Trump has affected my mortgage, my grocery and gas bills, my daughter’s education, my business, and the precautions my son takes simply to go downtown.

He has affected my sense of national stability, institutional competence, and civic dignity.

And for all that, I can’t see the payoff.

People sometimes ask why Donald Trump bothers me so much.

That is why.

"The Trouble with Terrible People"

Last week in the Oval Office, President Trump was asked about the upcoming visit of Chinese President Xi to Washington. He offered a familiar boast about being able to “handle” Xi, then added — almost casually — that Canada was the “worst to deal with” on trade.

It was an astonishing remark about our closest ally, especially in a season of war and threatened military and trade action across multiple fronts.

In reality, he gave Canada a compliment.

A functioning government is supposed to be difficult to move. Trade, war, borders, fisheries, oceans, and resource rights are not meant to bend instantly to the will of a single leader. They require process, negotiation, domestic consultation, and international restraint.

Democracies are designed to slow things down.

Prime Minister Carney can act quickly when time is genuinely of the essence. But even a duly elected leader is constrained by precedent, law, custom, and decency. He has a legislature, courts, provincial governments, constituents, citizens, and a national history that shapes what any Canadian government can reasonably do.

Some of Canada’s difficulty is simply Canada defending its interests. No country should be expected to surrender its economic independence or sovereign choices merely because a more powerful neighbor demands it.

But some of the difficulty is structural.

Canada is a working democracy, and working democracies are supposed to be difficult.

Authoritarian systems pride themselves on speed. One leader decides, and the state moves. There are fewer independent institutions to persuade, fewer meaningful centers of power capable of resisting, and fewer opportunities for citizens to interrupt what their government has decided to do. What looks from the outside like efficiency can simply be the absence of meaningful resistance.

Democracies pride themselves on friction.

Legislatures argue. Courts interfere. Provinces protect their prerogatives. Opposition parties object. Journalists expose things. Interest groups complain. Citizens protest. Elections loom. Laws constrain leaders.

It can be maddeningly inefficient.

That is partly the idea.

From the perspective of someone trying to make a deal, all of those institutions are obstacles. Why can’t the person in charge simply agree?

Because in a democracy, nobody is entirely in charge.

Not Carney. Not Parliament. Not the courts. Not the provinces.

And certainly not the president of another country.

That may help explain why Canada can seem more “difficult” than countries where power is concentrated more narrowly. Difficulty does not necessarily mean hostility. It may simply mean that another government cannot deliver everything being demanded of it — and should not be able to.

There is a reason democratic societies distribute power rather than merely search for the person best able to exercise it. The inconvenience is deliberate. Friction protects interests that might otherwise be ignored and people who might otherwise never be heard.

In an era when democratic constraint is increasingly treated as an inconvenience, it is worth remembering that difficulty is not a flaw.

It is the point.

Several years ago, Armando Bacot was one of the best players in college basketball — a dominant big man who stayed at North Carolina for five seasons and became a millionaire through NIL. At the time, remaining in college that long still seemed unusual for a player of his stature.

In hindsight, it was an excellent decision.

Bacot did not make the NBA and has continued his career overseas. But his extended stay at North Carolina gave him a degree from a reputable institution, substantial income, national exposure, and five years of basketball in a great conference in a beautiful part of the country. The college portion of his career may ultimately prove more lucrative than much of the professional portion.

That would once have sounded absurd.

Local player Darren Harris spent two seasons at Duke before transferring to Indiana, reportedly for a dramatically larger financial opportunity. Duke offered one kind of opportunity. Indiana offered another — including, reportedly, life-changing money.

Malik Mack faced a different version of the same calculation. He had a tremendous freshman season at Harvard, an institution capable of providing a lifetime of opportunity. But Harvard did not have the NIL infrastructure available at many major basketball programs. Mack transferred to Georgetown, where substantial NIL opportunities were available, and has moved once again, this time to Providence. There is no obvious answer to these choices anymore.

What is four years at Harvard worth compared with the opportunity to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars while you are nineteen or twenty? What is sitting on Duke’s bench worth if another excellent university will pay you considerably more to play? Education matters. So does money — particularly money available during the very brief period when an athlete possesses unusual market value.

Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers made another version of the calculation. Both maximized their years at Iowa and UConn, respectively, earning significant NIL income and extraordinary national attention. At the time, WNBA rookie salaries were tiny compared with the commercial opportunities available to elite college stars. The economics of the WNBA have since changed considerably, but for Clark and Bueckers, staying in college made financial sense.

Their college years were not simply preparation for professional basketball.

They were part of their professional economic lives.

We once treated college sports as a way to obtain an education — and, for the very best athletes, a path to professional sports. There were under-the-table benefits and plenty of hypocrisy, but the athlete was officially an amateur. The real money was supposed to come later.

Big-time college sports, of course, did not suddenly become a business. Stadiums, television contracts, coaching salaries, shoe deals, conference realignment, and March Madness settled that question long ago.

What changed is that the athlete became an acknowledged participant in the business.

And that has changed the calculation enormously.

A basketball player can now have an agent or adviser, negotiate his opportunities, transfer when another school offers a better situation, generate substantial revenue for his university, and earn hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of dollars while doing it.

Then he can graduate and discover that professional basketball offers him considerably less.

Which one was his professional career?

Increasingly, the answer is both. The better-paying professional job may simply have occurred while he was enrolled in college.

That is particularly important because the opportunities after college remain extraordinarily limited. Very few college basketball players will make the NBA. Only a fraction will make substantial money overseas. Yet a much larger group of talented college players can now earn meaningful money while they still possess the visibility and scarcity that major college basketball provides.

There are obvious problems with this new system. College athletics still lack many of the contractual protections, salary structures, and competitive rules that govern established professional leagues. The transfer market can resemble free agency without all the rules that make free agency comprehensible. Players, coaches, schools, collectives, and conferences are still figuring out what the market actually is.

But from the athlete’s perspective, there is something remarkable about the change.

For generations, we told athletes that college was an investment in their future. Stay in school. Get the degree. Prepare yourself for whatever comes next.

That advice may still be sound.

But the economics underneath it have changed.

For some athletes, college is no longer merely an investment in the future. It is where they are earning the money that may finance that future.

The professional career may come later.

The professional money may already have arrived.

"The Tournament That Used to Belong to All of Us"

American history contains more than enough cruelty. Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and other forms of hatred have produced violence, exclusion, and policies that inflicted real harm. Sometimes those injustices were defended as economic necessity. Sometimes they were justified as cultural protection. Sometimes they were simply the way a majority made itself feel superior. Human beings have never lacked for explanations.

Liberals often describe conservative policies as cruel. Conservatives reply that government cannot provide everything to everyone, that prosperity requires work, and that a stronger economy lifts all ships. Even if liberals doubt the sincerity of those arguments, they are at least coherent. It is hard to accuse Milton Friedman of indifference to human suffering.

But during Trump II, some policies seem to have abandoned even the traditional pretense that suffering is merely an unfortunate cost of achieving some larger purpose.

U.S. forces have now killed more than two hundred people in strikes on small boats the administration says were involved in drug trafficking. Yet we have remarkably little public evidence establishing what many of those vessels were carrying, where they were going, or even who the people aboard them were. Some of the dead have been identified as fishermen. The government’s own targeting criteria reportedly do not require evidence that narcotics are actually aboard the vessel.

Perhaps the administration possesses convincing intelligence. But ordinarily we would expect a government to interdict a vessel, search it, identify its occupants, seize contraband, arrest suspects, and present evidence. Destroying the boat and killing everyone aboard — without trial or any public demonstration that those killed posed an imminent threat — is something different.

We are also deporting people to countries they are not from. Cubans and Venezuelans have been sent to African nations. Others have been removed to countries with which they have little or no connection. If the purpose is simply immigration enforcement, the obvious question remains: why not return people to their actual countries?

And then there are people who followed the rules, lost their legal status, and wish to self-deport — only to find themselves detained anyway.

One could go on.

Racism may explain some of the rhetoric. Restrictionism may explain the desire for fewer immigrants. Border security may explain deportation. But none of those things, by themselves, explain why a Cuban should be deposited in Liberia, or why people aboard a small boat should be killed on the government’s assertion that they are involved in the drug trade.

The administration might call some of this deterrence. Make the consequences frightening enough and fewer migrants will come. Make the seas dangerous enough and fewer people will traffic drugs.

Perhaps.

But even that explanation requires us to supply a theory the government has not adequately demonstrated.

What exactly are we deterring?

If we do not know that drugs were aboard a particular boat, do not publicly know who the people aboard were, and do not know where the vessel was ultimately headed, it becomes difficult to describe their deaths as the regrettable cost of a clearly defined policy.

Perhaps there is a coherent strategy hidden behind information the government has chosen not to share. But after more than two hundred deaths, citizens should not have to invent one on its behalf.

And that leaves a more disturbing possibility.

Perhaps the spectacle of punishment has acquired value of its own. Boats explode. People die. Migrants are sent somewhere unfamiliar. People attempting to leave voluntarily are detained. The images and stories communicate power. Whether each act advances some larger objective can begin to seem almost secondary.

Every government imposes hardship. Taxes hurt someone. Wars kill people. Immigration laws separate people from places where they have built lives. Economic policies create winners and losers. The traditional defense is that the hardship purchases something the government considers necessary.

But cruelty becomes something different when suffering itself begins to appear useful.

The migrant suffers so another migrant will be afraid. The people on the boat die so others will fear making the journey. The punishment becomes visible because visibility may itself be part of the point.

Maybe that is deterrence.

Maybe there is some other theory.

Or perhaps, in some cases, the cruelty has become detached from any coherent policy objective at all.

We should be careful before claiming to know which explanation is true.

But the burden cannot be on citizens to construct a respectable rationale for their government while their government kills people without publicly establishing who they were or why death was necessary.

Perhaps there is a theory.

After more than two hundred deaths, the government owes us one.

Until then, what remains visible is the cruelty.

As we head toward the midterms, the Republican attack on Democratic candidates is familiar: they are socialists. The line has been used for decades, often with success. What is different now is that the label is not aimed solely at Bernie Sanders. A meaningful portion of the Democratic left is comfortable describing itself as socialist, or at least as sympathetic to the tradition.

Their concerns are not mysterious. They see widening economic inequality. They see college becoming unaffordable, retirement increasingly out of reach, and rents and mortgages rising faster than many incomes. They wonder why one of the wealthiest countries in the world cannot provide healthcare, education and retirement security comparable to what citizens of other wealthy democracies enjoy.

Republicans have traditionally called much of this socialism.

But most Western European countries are not socialist in the traditional sense. They have private property, corporations, wealthy entrepreneurs, stock markets and competitive market economies. What many have chosen is a more expansive social-democratic bargain: capitalism accompanied by greater government responsibility for healthcare, education, retirement, family support and economic security.

If that is socialism, as Republicans have spent generations telling us, it is hardly surprising that some Americans might decide they like parts of socialism.

But there is another irony.

For all the Republican rhetoric about socialism, Trumpism increasingly embraces many of the practices Americans were once taught to fear when they imagined an overbearing state.

The federal government takes ownership interests in private companies and asserts influence over corporate decisions. Tariffs are imposed according to the preferences of one president. Businesses can find themselves rewarded or punished according to their relationship with the government. Cronies and loyalists are elevated to positions of extraordinary power. Cabinet meetings become exercises in public praise of the leader. Monuments, celebrations and government imagery increasingly revolve around a single man. Foreign policy includes demands for resources, influence and even territory.

None of those things makes Donald Trump a Marxist. Personality cults, cronyism, territorial ambition and centralized power have existed under monarchies, fascist governments, military dictatorships and authoritarian capitalist states as well.

But that distinction exposes the silliness of the word as it is used in American politics.

If government interference in private enterprise is socialism when Democrats propose it, what is it when Republicans practice it?

If an expansive healthcare system is socialism, why is government ownership of part of a corporation not socialism?

If excessive government power is what Americans were supposed to fear about socialism, why should that power become less frightening when exercised by a Republican president?

The answer, increasingly, seems to be that socialism is whatever Democrats do.

Government intervention in healthcare is socialism. Government intervention in business under Trump is economic nationalism. Government assistance to poor families is socialism. Government favors for preferred industries are industrial policy. Government regulation of markets is socialism, unless the regulation comes through tariffs imposed by the president. Centralized government power is dangerous until the person exercising it is someone you support.

The word has ceased to describe a coherent philosophy. It has become a political accusation.

And that is what makes the attack particularly strange now.

Democrats are proposing policies that, in many cases, resemble those already operating in successful capitalist democracies: broader healthcare coverage, more affordable education, stronger retirement protections and a larger social safety net. Republicans may oppose those policies. There are legitimate arguments about their cost, effectiveness and proper scope.

But calling them socialist tells us almost nothing.

Meanwhile, Trumpism has embraced something considerably more consequential than a larger welfare state: the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the national government and, increasingly, in the hands of one president.

That was supposed to be part of what frightened us.

Perhaps the dumbest thing about American socialism is therefore the argument over the word.

If affordable healthcare is socialist, voters are entitled to want some socialism. If government ownership of private companies is socialist, Republicans are practicing some of it themselves. And if authoritarianism is socialism, then we have confused an economic system with a form of government.

Better to ask the questions that actually matter.

What should government provide? What should markets provide? How much economic inequality can a democracy tolerate? And, most importantly, how much power should any government — or any president — possess?

Those questions are difficult enough without pretending one word answers all of them.

Who could object to that?

The problem begins when election integrity is quietly transformed into election perfection — when no amount of verification is sufficient because no human system can eliminate every conceivable possibility of error.

Courts are not infallible. Election officials are not infallible. Voting machines are not infallible. Human beings counting pieces of paper are certainly not infallible. But the grievances of a losing candidate are not evidence either. And the striking fact about modern American elections is how little adjudicated voter fraud we actually find compared with the enormous number of votes cast.

We also tend to forget how comfortable we are with statistical certainty everywhere else in life.

Medicine does not require every possible test before reaching a diagnosis. Manufacturers do not inspect every molecule in every product. Pollsters can tell us a great deal about millions of voters by speaking with a relatively small sample. Courts themselves do not demand absolute certainty even before taking away a person’s freedom; our criminal standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Elections can be approached with the same understanding of probability.

That does not mean replacing actual vote counts with exit polls or statistical models. Votes should be counted. Paper ballots should be preserved. Machines should be tested. Fraud should be investigated and prosecuted.

But there are already sophisticated ways to determine whether a reported election result deserves our confidence. Risk-limiting audits, for example, examine randomly selected paper ballots and use statistical analysis to determine whether the reported outcome is reliable. If discrepancies appear, more ballots are examined. If necessary, the process can expand all the way to a full hand count.

The closer the election, the more scrutiny it deserves.

Florida in 2000 demonstrated why. When a presidential election is decided by 537 votes out of millions cast, tiny imperfections suddenly matter enormously. Hanging chads, machine tolerances, judgments about voter intent and recount procedures can conceivably affect the result. An election that close deserves extraordinary examination.

But a 537-vote margin and a 537,000-vote margin do not present the same problem.

At some point, the possibility that enough errors exist to change a large result becomes so remote that continuing to search for them ceases to be a meaningful exercise in election integrity. It becomes the pursuit of certainty that no election — and indeed almost no human endeavor — can provide.

That distinction seems increasingly lost.

We devote extraordinary political energy to searching voter rolls, changing identification requirements, challenging mail ballots and constructing new mechanisms to verify eligibility, all in pursuit of imperfections that may exist but rarely appear in sufficient numbers to affect an election. Meanwhile, every additional safeguard carries costs of its own: money, bureaucracy, confusion and, potentially, eligible voters who find it more difficult to cast ballots that should count.

Election integrity matters. Eligible voters should be able to vote. Votes should be counted accurately. Fraud should be prosecuted. Close elections should receive heightened scrutiny.

But integrity is not the same thing as perfection.

At some point, every functioning system must decide what constitutes sufficient evidence that it worked. If no amount of auditing, recounting, litigation or statistical confirmation can ever answer that question, we are no longer protecting elections. We are creating a system in which no election ever has to be accepted.

The danger is not that our elections can never be perfect.

It is that we may someday require perfection only from elections whose results we dislike.

Twenty years ago, when I was cycling regularly, I would ride Hains Point every morning — and often again at lunch — circling the peninsula in that spectacular early light. Traffic was minimal. Cyclists moved fast and slow, alone or in groups. Runners and walkers traced the water’s edge. People sat on park benches looking across the Potomac. On Thanksgiving morning, runners gathered before sunrise for the annual 5K. On weekends, families barbecued, played badminton, listened to music. Serious swimmers headed to the public pool. Golfers — duffers and the occasional purist — worked their way around the course. And after dark, teenagers found quiet places to make out in their cars.

And the scenery was extraordinary: multiple varieties of cherry trees, a landscape good for the environment, good for tourism, and miraculous for daily users. Ships rested in the channel, some for the night, some for longer. All of it sat just minutes from the monuments.

Earlier this year, President Trump announced plans to transform the public golf facilities at East Potomac Park into a championship-level course. The news arrives so quickly now that outrage rarely has time to form. I did not initially realize that “East Potomac Park” meant Hains Point — one of the most spectacular pieces of public property in the country.

And the work is already underway.

More than sixty trees have been removed. The administration says the removal is routine maintenance, separate from the proposed golf-course renovation, and that the trees were hazardous, dying, or invasive. It has disputed reports about the removal of cherry trees.

The administration says a lot of things and disputes a lot of reports.

But the math is not reassuring. A championship golf course requires space, and Hains Point has only so much of it. Preliminary designs suggest golf could occupy considerably more of the peninsula. On a pancake-flat strip of land already shared by cyclists, runners, swimmers, fishermen, picnickers, trees, and waterfront paths, something has to give.

The larger problem is that we still do not really know what Hains Point will look like when this is finished. Final plans, a detailed construction schedule, and even an estimated cost have not been made public. Images of proposed designs have raised questions about the bicycle path, waterfront access, cherry trees, and other recreational uses of the peninsula.

One would think that property this remarkable would require extraordinary deliberation before being altered.

The irony is that Hains Point already had golf. It wasn’t Augusta National, and that was part of its charm. Ordinary people could play there. Meanwhile, cyclists rode around it, runners passed it, families picnicked beside it, fishermen worked the shoreline, swimmers used the pool, and people came simply to look at the water.

Nobody needed the entire peninsula.

Everyone got some of it.

That is what made Hains Point extraordinary. It was not a monument, although it sat among monuments. It was not a country club, although you could play golf there. It was not a nature preserve, although wildlife and magnificent trees surrounded you. It was simply public space — beautiful, imperfect, inexpensive, and available.

And our concern about what might happen to it does not arise in a vacuum.

This administration has already demonstrated a willingness to make dramatic physical changes to some of Washington’s most familiar places and structures. The East Wing is not an abstraction or a partisan interpretation. It is a physical reminder that things we assumed were permanent can disappear remarkably quickly.

That record matters when we are asked to trust that another extraordinary piece of public Washington will emerge intact from an ambitious transformation whose final plans the public has not even seen.

Public land is different from private property. A president may exercise enormous authority over federal agencies, but places like Hains Point belong, in a meaningful sense, to everyone. Their ordinariness is part of their value. They should be difficult to transform quickly precisely because no single administration owns them.

I rode thousands of miles around Hains Point. Other people played thousands of rounds there, caught fish there, taught children to ride bicycles there, watched the cherry blossoms there, sat on benches overlooking the Potomac, or simply did nothing at all.

None of us owned it.

That was the point.

I am not sure what will remain once the administration is finished.

Looking at recent images of the White House, it is difficult to be optimistic.

Then came the 24-hour news cycle, followed by the explosion of partisan talk radio and cable opinion in the 1990s. The distinction between reporting, analysis, and entertainment became increasingly difficult to maintain. The media environment changed, and not subtly.

During Trump II, the press has been on the defensive. Prominent commentators have left or been removed from network and cable positions as the industry itself has come under increasing political pressure from the administration. The pressure has grown almost absurd. This weekend, Trump threatened Kristen Welker for reporting — accurately — that his record of backing primary candidates has produced mixed results. He called for the FCC to punish her.

One hopes that repeating what Welker said is still permissible on Substack.

In this environment, YouTube — and to a lesser degree Substack and other digital platforms — has thrived. Former network and cable hosts such as Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Chris Cuomo, Tucker Carlson, and William Kristol, along with independent operations like MeidasTouch, can deliver commentary with reasonable production values and without the constraints of airtime.

The beauty of the medium is its simplicity. No tuning in at a specific hour. No DVR. No waiting. The link is there when you want it.

It is telling that Trump fixated on Welker while most of us saw the clip only after he complained about it.

The sheer volume of talent and analysis now available is extraordinary. If you want to understand the Ukraine war, you can pull up a feed devoted almost entirely to it. If you want daily updates on vulnerable Senate seats, Chuck Todd will oblige. A discussion that once might have received six minutes between commercial breaks can now run an hour. Historians, former diplomats, journalists, military analysts, and politicians can speak directly to audiences without waiting for a television producer to decide that they deserve airtime.

And the administration has fewer tools to regulate this world. It can pressure networks and their corporate owners. It can complain to the FCC. It can exert pressure on technology companies over monetization and distribution. But it is considerably harder to make thousands of independent voices disappear.

That is a remarkable development for democracy.

It may also be a dangerous one.

Everyone can have a YouTube channel or a Substack. It is the adult version of our children’s TikTok problem. The old media system concentrated enormous power in a handful of gatekeepers. The new one disperses that power almost completely.

That is exhilarating when the gatekeepers themselves are being pressured by government. It is frightening when a democratic electorate needs some common understanding of reality.

A functioning democracy requires reliable information — but who decides what is reliable when everyone has his own network, his own experts, and increasingly his own facts?

News has grown increasingly tribal over the past 35 years. Fox News, with its unusually close relationship to the current White House, has accelerated the trend. But Fox may increasingly represent the old version of the problem. The new version is much larger: millions of us assembling our own news networks, one subscription and one algorithmic recommendation at a time.

We may never again have a Walter Cronkite whom much of the country watches together. Perhaps our memory of that era is too romantic anyway. The new system offers something the old one never could: an almost limitless marketplace of information, expertise, argument, and occasionally nonsense, available whenever we want it.

It is a complicated moment for democracy.

But for a news hound, it is an extraordinary one.

Several years ago, Rand Paul was attacked by a neighbor after what was apparently an epic dispute over landscaping. The assault was indefensible and left the senator seriously injured. Still, the sheer absurdity of a neighbor becoming so exasperated with Rand Paul that the dispute ended up in federal court seemed somehow consistent with the public figure we had come to know.

Rand has always been a complicated figure.

His father, Ron Paul, served for many years in the House and became one of the most recognizable voices in the libertarian movement. He frustrated nearly everyone, but he was consistent to the point of asceticism: the federal government should act only in rare circumstances, and almost never beyond them. If Ron Paul had a defining trait, it was that he never trimmed his sails.

Could Rand be Ron? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Ron’s most faithful political heir may have been Thomas Massie, whose almost pathological consistency recently cost him his seat. Trump targeted him for defeat, and Republican voters obliged. Bravery and principle are admirable. They can also cost you your job.

Rand picks his spots.

He kicks the tires on nearly every military intervention. He may not lead the opposition to masked federal agents, but he will grill administration officials, demand information, hold up a nominee, and make it unmistakably clear when he thinks government power has gone too far. He remains a reliable anti–big government vote, though he is not his father.

Or perhaps he is his father — but one who intends to remain in the Senate.

He may want Ron Paul’s philosophy while keeping Rand Paul’s career.

It is easy to admire Ron’s purity. It is harder to determine how much that purity accomplished. He spent decades as a lonely House member whose vote was often symbolic. A vote cast alone may be principled, but it is still a vote cast alone.

Rand seems to want the libertarian impulse without the libertarian isolation. His compromises keep him in the room — questioning nominees, exercising committee power, and occasionally possessing enough leverage that an administration has to listen.

Perhaps that is accommodation.

Perhaps it is politics.

And Thomas Massie provides an uncomfortable comparison. He demonstrated what political independence looks like when carried nearly to its logical conclusion. He repeatedly defied his own party and president, even when doing so threatened his career. Eventually, it did.

Rand watched all of this from the Senate.

So who is Rand Paul?

Do we even like him? Does it matter? Even if we find libertarianism eccentric, are some of its instincts — skepticism of war, concentrated federal power, surveillance, debt — particularly useful at a moment when government power itself deserves more scrutiny?

Ron Paul offered purity. Thomas Massie demonstrated its price. Rand Paul has chosen something messier: principle tempered by self-preservation.

Maybe that makes him less courageous.

Maybe it makes him more useful.

These are complicated times, and Rand is a complicated person.

In the latest trade negotiations with Canada, Howard Lutnick took the lead for the United States. So Canada now finds itself staring at terms intrusive enough to raise real questions about its sovereignty — and all from a man who recently testified under oath that he took his entire family to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. The honesty is refreshing. The judgment is another matter.

Fox News may not have highlighted that testimony. The connection between Fox and the administration is close; people move back and forth with remarkable ease. But their viewers may not know. They seem deeply interested in Epstein — until the moment a politician they favor appears in photographs or footage alongside him. Then the curiosity fades.

It is difficult to imagine a serious country placing another’s sovereignty in question while sending Howard Lutnick as its representative. Most countries do not have Fox News. Most countries would not treat this as normal.

The problem is not merely the demands.

It is who is making them.

Bill Maher and Dana Bash had an interesting exchange on Real Time, one in which Maher edged surprisingly close to Trump’s position that Democrats are anti-Semitic, or that a Jewish person cannot reasonably support Democrats at all. For Maher, this issue and the broader question of political correctness seem to be the two matters that have pushed him outside the tent. Given how sensitive this generation of Republicans has become, rewriting media narratives, policing language, even revising history, it is hard to take the PC argument seriously.

But Israel does require serious engagement.

Maher’s argument is not literally that Israel can never be criticized. He has criticized Netanyahu himself. His contention seems to be that much of what now presents itself as criticism of Israel has crossed into something darker, and that the Democratic Party has become too tolerant of it.

That deserves consideration.

But the definition he sometimes employs seems to expand until perfectly ordinary objections to Israeli policy become evidence of something else.

Israel is a democracy, at least in theory, and its leaders can be questioned like any others. Domestic decisions, foreign policy, military strategy: all are complicated, all are subject to debate. We criticize our own country constantly. It is practically the default setting of American politics. When the United States goes to war or takes any consequential action, criticism follows immediately. No one assumes our leaders are righteous by virtue of holding office.

Why would our default position be that Israel is always right?

It might be.

But it must be analyzed, not assumed.

Do people criticize Israel who are also anti-Semitic? Of course. Anti-Zionism can provide convenient cover for people whose real objection is to Jews. Pretending otherwise would be naive.

But it is equally lazy to assume that disagreement with Israel establishes anti-Semitism.

Support for Gazans is perfectly reasonable. One can oppose Hamas and still believe Palestinians deserve rights, dignity, safety, and statehood. One can object to an Israeli military operation, criticize settlements, or question the conduct of Netanyahu’s government without harboring prejudice against Jews.

Calling Israel’s conduct in Gaza genocide may be wrong. But being wrong about Israel foreign policy is not evidence that someone hates Jews.

There is also a danger in expanding the definition too far. Anti-Semitism is real, ancient, and occasionally murderous. A term that must describe hatred of Jews should not be weakened by applying it reflexively to every objection to an Israeli military operation. If everything becomes anti-Semitism, we may become less capable of recognizing the real thing.

Are there anti-Semites among Democrats? Surely. Racists too. There are anti-Semites and racists among Republicans as well. The problem is not partisan. It is human.

None of this means accusations of anti-Semitism should be casually dismissed. Quite the opposite. They should be taken seriously enough to require evidence.

The challenge is distinguishing criticism of a government from prejudice against a people, and resisting the temptation to collapse the two whenever it is politically convenient.

Anti-Semitism is too serious a charge for its meaning to become blurred by our disagreements over Israel foreign policy.

In the same season, Washington has continued sparring with Canada over trade, floated extraordinary demands, and even made inquiries involving the Marshall Islands and the Falklands. It has been a busy season for American ambition.

Even during the colonial era, great powers felt compelled to offer some justification for invasion or appropriation. Missionary work, civilizing missions, the supposed uplift of indigenous populations — the rhetoric was often self-serving, but it acknowledged that naked ambition required a fig leaf. Over the twentieth century, through decolonization, international law, and the growing principle of national sovereignty, the idea increasingly took hold that a country’s natural resources belonged to its people. Corporations sometimes used governments to secure access in ways that resembled appropriation, but the official principle remained intact.

The same pattern held in military affairs. Hitler invaded Poland after staging incidents intended to manufacture evidence of Polish aggression. He invoked the protection of ethnic Germans as he dismantled Czechoslovakia. Putin surrounded his invasion of Ukraine with an elaborate architecture of justification — NATO expansion, threats to Russia, protection of Russian speakers, “denazification.” Even the worst actors felt obliged to explain themselves.

That instinct to justify aggression is not entirely unhealthy. Even a false explanation acknowledges that the world expects reasons. The lie itself pays tribute to the existence of a norm.

A world in which no explanation is needed — in which a powerful country may take what it wants simply because doing so is advantageous — is considerably more dangerous. Once “it is a good deal for us” becomes sufficient justification, there is no limiting principle. A stronger country can always identify something it wants from a weaker one.

International law, institutions, and norms exist to restrain precisely this impulse. They are imperfect and have always been violated, often by the United States itself. But their imperfection does not make them meaningless. They reflect a basic principle: the resources of a country belong to that country.

That is what makes the Venezuelan agreement so unsettling. The United States removed Nicolás Maduro from power by force and then negotiated an unprecedented oil arrangement with the government it helped install and whose position now depends heavily on American power. Trump describes the result as an extraordinary deal for America. But the circumstances of the negotiation cannot be separated from the agreement itself.

There is no “great deal” in which you remove a country’s leader, install his successor, and then negotiate with that successor for control of the country’s resources. The imbalance of power is not incidental to the deal. It is the deal.

For centuries, powerful nations have behaved badly. They have invaded, extracted, coerced, and lied about why they were doing it. The hypocrisy was sometimes grotesque. But hypocrisy contained an unintended concession: there were rules important enough to pretend you were following.

The danger is not only in what is taken.

It is in the idea that nothing needs to be justified at all.

Last week the United States and Canada found themselves in intense trade negotiations. Deep into the talks came American demands so astonishingly intrusive that they sparked outrage across Canada — even among factions normally friendly to Trump. Washington sought restrictions on Canada’s ability to negotiate agreements with other nations and challenged protections involving the French language and Canadian culture. For a country that preaches freedom, these were remarkable demands. One half‑expected the next clause to forbid Cubans from speaking Spanish.

And then came the executive order directing the United States government to call Lake Ontario “Lake America” — a generic label that manages to be both grandiose and confusing, resonating across a hemisphere that already calls itself America. Canada, unsurprisingly, will continue calling it Lake Ontario.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has been resourceful, creative, and brave throughout his time in office, and this is another test of his leadership. Canada entered Trump II extraordinarily dependent on the American market, particularly for its exports. As damaging as Trump’s trade wars have been to the American economy, the disruption poses an even more immediate problem for a smaller neighbor whose economy has been deeply integrated with ours for generations. At some point, some Canadians will inevitably be tempted to give Washington what it wants simply to restore stability.

That is what makes the current confrontation so consequential.

Canada cannot realistically replace the United States as its principal economic partner, nor should it necessarily want to. Geography matters. Supply chains matter. A border stretching thousands of miles matters. But importance need not mean dependence.

The objective is not to replace the United States.

It is to reduce the price of saying no.

That helps explain Canada’s increasing interest in Europe. Membership in the European Union has even been floated — by Europeans as well as Canadians — although the legal and geographic obstacles make actual accession remote, and Carney himself has emphasized partnership rather than membership. Still, the fact that the conversation exists is remarkable. Canada is a NATO member, maintains deep historical ties to Europe, and already describes itself as increasingly aligned with European partners. A much closer economic and strategic relationship is hardly fanciful.

Europe is only part of the answer. Canada will continue expanding trade ties with China, Commonwealth nations, the EU, and throughout the Americas. Diversification is not a rejection of the United States. It is insurance against a relationship in which economic dependence can be converted into political leverage.

And Canada has reason not to make permanent decisions based solely on the present government in Washington.

The American midterm elections are approaching. If Democrats regain the House, the Senate, or both, the political environment surrounding Canada could change considerably. Congress cannot dictate every aspect of foreign or trade policy, but congressional control means legislation, appropriations, investigations, hearings, and the ability to impose political costs. We have already seen the House vote to challenge Trump’s tariffs on Canada. A different Congress would not end the dispute, but it could make an aggressively hostile posture toward one of America’s closest allies considerably harder to sustain.

So Carney must operate on two clocks. In the short term, he must preserve enough economic stability to withstand American pressure while waiting to see whether November changes the balance in Washington. In the long term, Canada must make sure that no future American president possesses quite this much leverage over Canadian choices.

That may prove to be the great unintended consequence of Trump II.

An administration determined to demonstrate American leverage may instead teach one of America’s closest allies how dangerous that leverage has become.

Canada does not need to escape the United States.

It needs to make saying no affordable.

"China, Professionalism, and The Price of Disorder"

Deflection has probably always been part of rhetoric, but it has come into full bloom in an age of tribal politics and social media. I don’t quite remember studying “deflection” as a formal category in Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates, though Socrates certainly spent plenty of time trying to keep people from changing the subject.

But now it is everywhere.

Last week Bill O’Reilly erupted at Chris Cuomo for “deflecting,” changing the subject when discussing Senator Ossoff’s comments about Natalie Harp — that “flying around with Natalie” was a bridge too far. I’m not sure whether Cuomo was arguing that it wasn’t a deflection, or that the deflection was appropriate, but O’Reilly wasn’t buying either explanation.

If we focus on Ossoff’s comments, they hardly seem over the top. Harp and Trump obviously have a close relationship, and who assists the president is a matter of public concern. If there is a hint of innuendo, I’m not sure it matters.

But the exchange raises a more interesting question: when is a deflection actually a deflection?

Not every change in frame is the same. Sometimes it is simple evasion. Someone asks about the conduct of your side and you respond by pointing to something the other side did. Nothing about the comparison answers the original question. You have simply changed the subject.

Sometimes, however, a comparison establishes a standard.

Cuomo noted that Trump himself has said far worse, and explicitly so. That isn’t necessarily a deflection in the sense of avoiding the subject. It can be an attempt to establish a standard for what counts as inappropriate political rhetoric. If the leader of the free world routinely crosses the line, that is at least relevant to determining whether Ossoff’s comment constitutes the scandal some claim.

Of course, in these days, that logic can justify quite a lot.

There is also context. Additional information sometimes changes how we understand the original question. Calling every attempt to broaden an argument a “deflection” allows us to exclude inconvenient facts simply by declaring them irrelevant.

Then there is hypocrisy.

Deflection is often used to demonstrate that someone did not object when “their own side” behaved similarly. Glenn Greenwald has practically turned this into a signature move. And the hypocrisy question has its place. If I condemned something when your party did it and excuse it when mine does, that tells you something useful about my credibility.

But it does not resolve the underlying question.

Hypocrisy is evidence about the advocate, not necessarily about the argument.

The duty of every citizen or commentator to maintain perfectly consistent outrage may be admirable, but it cannot govern every conversation. Taken too far, the hunt for hypocrisy becomes its own form of subject‑changing. Instead of discussing whether something is right or wrong, we spend our time investigating whether everyone discussing it has previously passed the appropriate ideological purity test.

At some point, does the accusation of deflection itself become a deflection?

Deflection becomes more consequential when it obscures causation.

If someone asks the president’s team about inflation and affordability, it can be perfectly fair to note that prices also increased under previous administrations. That may provide useful context.

But the next question still has to be: Why are prices rising now?

If tariffs, disruptions to the low‑wage workforce, energy costs, or conflict around the Strait of Hormuz are contributing to higher prices, invoking the previous administration cannot substitute for examining those causes. At that point the comparison has stopped illuminating the question and begun avoiding it.

Comparison can illuminate causation. It cannot replace it.

We’ve all shared O’Reilly’s frustration when we hear a deflection. Get to the point. Answer the question. But context is sometimes part of the answer. Comparison can expose hypocrisy, establish a standard, or illuminate causation.

The trick is determining whether someone has changed the frame to help us see the subject more clearly — or to keep us from seeing it at all.

Perhaps that is the difference between context and deflection.

"More on Deflections, Both-Sidism, and Whataboutism"

There’s something very special about the opening Friday night of the high school football season. In many ways, it’s even better than the more consequential postseason games. The weather is forgiving, the air feels new, and the season still belongs to possibility rather than record. Football means far more than it should in our society, but when you stand in those crowds, it’s easy to see why. Even with the risk of serious injury, it remains an amazing communal event.

The crowds are enormous on opening night and early in the season. Yes, it’s the weather. But it’s also the atmosphere. Football is the sport that most rewards experience and seniority, so every season brings a fresh turnover of players stepping into roles that suddenly matter. They join the returning stars for their season in the sun. Coaches have had training camp to see what they have, but it takes nearly a season to discover where the pieces fit. Watching that process unfold is part of the fun. Can Bobby really handle the quarterback position? We’re about to find out.

Football is also a sport where coaching makes a massive difference. You are organizing offense, defense, and special teams, plus the logistical sprawl of running a team and staging a game. When you watch high school football, you see leadership and management in real time. Hundreds of small decisions eventually reveal whether an organization works.

But football is entertainment too. It’s the new cheerleading squad, this year’s marching band, the dance team, the drumline. Area schools put forward excellent groups, and they are very much part of the show. Football may provide the excuse, but the entire school creates the occasion. And it’s the first great social event of the school year. Everyone will be there. The visiting team will travel. The stands will be full of people who haven’t seen one another since June.

Friday night I’ll head to the next neighborhood to watch two perennial powers: Madison at Stone Bridge. Both reached the state playoffs last year and have been among Northern Virginia’s most consistently successful programs of the past decade. Stone Bridge is coached by former Commander Cedric Gholston; Madison by the shrewd Justin Counts. Stone Bridge is loaded, and Madison always reloads. Last year’s opener between them ended with a few tense moments and some rumored bad feeling.

It sounds like an amazing night.

The records can come later. Opening night still belongs to possibility.

"The Season in the Sun"

Recently we’ve gotten a glimpse of Trump’s foreign policy and his view of governance. The United States has withdrawn joint exercises with South Korea — citing his relationship with Kim Jong Un, South Korea’s reluctance to support the U.S. in the Iran war, and even a trade quarrel with Canada, where he has suggested that Canada enjoys the benefits of the United States without being a state.

My first reaction, examining Trump’s approach, is that he seems to view the United States as the world’s guarantor of safety — a guarantor that is perpetually under‑appreciated. South Korea should pay more or be more grateful. Canada should stop “free‑riding.” Allies are judged less by shared interests than by whether their leaders strike him as strong or flattering.

But in Canada and South Korea, the government must provide more than protection from leaders Trump admires. They must provide healthcare. A framework for retirement. A functioning social safety net. They would not allow masked government agents to demand papers from citizens on the street. That is America now. Protection from countries Trump considers allies is not the point. Citizens ask instead what their own government is providing.

Which brings us to the deeper problem.

The United States is losing sight of the point of governance. National government is not merely for protection, nor for the forceful removal of undocumented people, nor for the theatrical policing of allies who fail to praise us loudly enough. America has forgotten the basic purpose of national government: to build the conditions under which its citizens can live stable, dignified, productive lives.

Foreign policy is part of that. But it is not the whole of it.

And gratitude from allies is not a substitute for competence at home.

I first discovered Dolly Parton as a fourteen-year-old, watching her hilarious turn in 9 to 5, resisting Dabney Coleman with a confidence that felt all too real. I was in love, of course — but she was far too much for me, and frankly too much for anyone. That was part of the charm.

My sister was the true devotee. She played “Two Doors Down” endlessly, a sweet little Dolly confection, and reminded me that Parton wrote one of the most remarkable songs in American pop culture, “I Will Always Love You” — already a country classic before Whitney Houston carried it into another universe.

Dolly made everything look easy. A marriage that lasted nearly sixty years. A deliberately outrageous public persona that she somehow carried effortlessly for six decades. An ability to address social issues — gay rights, LGBTQ equality, even trans issues — without alienating the conservatives who formed a large part of her fan base.

She understood the joke without ever becoming the joke.

When asked about plastic surgery, she famously quipped, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” That was Dolly: self-aware, disarming, and nearly impossible not to love. The hair, the rhinestones, the figure, the clothes — she got there before anyone else could. Nobody could embarrass Dolly Parton by pointing out that Dolly Parton was over the top. She had already told you she was.

Behind all that artifice was an exceptionally serious songwriter, businesswoman and philanthropist. Her Imagination Library gave away books to children by the hundreds of millions, somehow without turning generosity into a self-congratulatory brand. What began in her home county in Tennessee eventually reached children around the world.

She remained fiercely loyal to Tennessee even as she became a star in Hollywood, music and business. Her story is not extraordinary simply because of her talent, beauty, charm or kindness — though she had all of them in abundance.

It is extraordinary because of the simple things.

She became one of the most recognizable people in the world and remained rooted in the same place. She shared nearly sixty years with the same man. She carried herself with a humility that rarely felt manufactured. She could laugh at herself while taking her work seriously.

The artifice was enormous.

The person underneath it seemed remarkably unaffected.

RIP, Dolly.

I’ve never liked the notion that America needs a businessman as president. Whatever success Donald Trump or Elon Musk have had in commerce does not automatically translate to success in governance. Leadership, management, judgment: yes, they matter in both worlds. But understanding policy, politics, and the machinery of government is something else entirely. You can be a great president and a great businessman, but there is no particular reason to assume success at one predicts success at the other.

Which brings me, somewhat inconveniently, to Mark Cuban.

Cuban became a prominent advocate for Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign that ultimately ended in defeat. Hardly a conventional liberal, Cuban seemed to be a never‑Trumper without the zeal — less offended by ideological heresy than persuaded that government works better without Trump’s improvisational style. And unlike many business celebrities who wander into politics, Cuban brings not merely opinions about policy but an obvious interest in how policy actually works.

In some ways, Cuban recalls the more intellectually interesting Newt Gingrich of the 1990s: fascinated by whether markets and incentives could solve public problems that liberals instinctively approached through government. There was once a lively strain of conservatism built around precisely those arguments. It produced disagreements worth having.

Listening to Cuban discuss healthcare feels like a return to that world.

His Cost Plus Drugs venture is almost a political philosophy disguised as a pharmacy. The premise is remarkably straightforward: expose the actual cost of a drug, add a transparent markup, eliminate opaque middlemen, and see whether competition can accomplish what layers of regulation have struggled to do. Cuban carries the same argument into his criticism of pharmacy benefit managers, emphasizing transparency and market structure rather than simply demanding another government program.

Ask Cuban about DEI and he tends to make a business argument rather than a cultural one. His defense is essentially that looking for talent where competitors are not looking can help a company find people it otherwise would have missed. Whether one agrees with every conclusion is almost secondary to what makes the approach interesting: he tends to ask whether something works.

That instinct extends beyond healthcare. Ask him about technology, regulation, or economic policy and he works backward from incentives, costs, competition, and consequences rather than forward from ideology. Even his healthcare advocacy has crossed partisan lines. Cuban pushed the Trump administration on drug pricing during Trump’s first term, supported Harris in 2024, and more recently has sought Trump administration support for changes he believes would encourage domestic generic drug manufacturing.

Cuban is hardly absent from cultural controversies. He has fought publicly over DEI and other contentious subjects. But he rarely seems interested in culture war as an end in itself. He tends to drag the argument back toward the practical question: does this help the business, the employee, the consumer, or the economy?

That distinction matters.

American politics has become extraordinarily proficient at producing arguments that cannot be resolved. The participants disagree about identity, motives, patriotism, history, even reality itself. There is no obvious endpoint because frequently there is no policy question left to answer.

An argument with Cuban might actually end somewhere.

Of course, Cuban’s long public life would provide opposition researchers with plenty to examine. Anyone who has spent decades running companies, owning a professional sports franchise, appearing on television, and speaking as freely as Cuban does will have accumulated statements and decisions requiring explanation. That is the price of having actually done things.

But it would be refreshing to see a businessman enter politics with sensibilities one might not always agree with, but could at least argue with.

Market‑minded politicians who are neither culture‑war entrepreneurs nor reflexive defense hawks have become surprisingly rare. Cuban could be a fascinating adversary for liberals — someone who might force a real argument about markets, government, incentives, opportunity, and the proper boundaries between them rather than another theatrical argument about identity and grievance.

Perhaps that is an awfully modest qualification for the presidency.

But in American politics today, the prospect of an opponent worth arguing with feels almost radical.