One of my favorite politicians of my lifetime was Charles Rangel — a Korean War hero with enough charisma and swagger for a dozen members of Congress. I agreed with him on most issues, but more than that, I admired his ability to survive and operate in the sharp-elbowed world of American politics. He was a friend and confidant of Nancy Pelosi, a man who understood both policy and power.

So when he was sanctioned by the House for ethics violations, it was a genuinely sad day. Watching him, a man I respected, brought to tears on the House floor was painful. And the violations themselves were hardly the sort of thing that resonate with ordinary voters — a tax deduction here, a foundation donation there. Inside-baseball infractions. The sort of technical missteps that seem almost quaint when set beside what some Republicans have walked away from unscathed.

Contrast that with the case of Graham Platner, now seeking the nomination to replace Susan Collins. Here, the allegations are not obscure or technical. They are the kind of things any voter can understand immediately: tattoos linked to Nazi imagery, explicit messages, even accusations of domestic violence. You can call it opposition research or the press doing its job, but if the claims are true, they go directly to character. They make us question whether we can trust the person at all — which, of course, is the point of raising them.

In the end, however, voters rarely choose among saints. They choose among coalitions. In our two-party system, the decisive judgment often occurs in the primary, where voters choose the candidate they believe can carry the banner in November. Once the general election arrives, the choice narrows. Most members of Congress vote with their party the overwhelming majority of the time. The job, structurally speaking, is not complicated.

But when we look at the flaws of a politician, the question becomes: which flaws matter, and which can we live with? How do those personal failings shape the decisions they will make in office? I happen to think Susan Collins is better than many in her party, and I don’t feel compelled to punish her for being human like the rest. But if a candidate is so compromised that we cannot imagine them representing us with integrity, then we have a different problem entirely.

Primary voters have now spoken. Perhaps that is enough. Or perhaps the harder question remains the same one it has always been: not whether a politician has flaws, but which flaws we are willing to excuse in someone who would represent us.

“Hemisphere of Our Own Discontent”

And yet people are still coming. Players are still coming. Officials are still coming.

If they can.

We are hassling visiting teams over visas. Searching players at the point of entry. A top African official cannot enter the country. Meanwhile, Mexico and Canada are hosting welcoming events for travelers headed to their matches — a contrast that speaks for itself.

Still, they come. We rightly barred Russia from international competition after the invasion of Ukraine, but for the United States, the world seems prepared to suspend its outrage. Even when we tell our guests they must leave the country immediately after their matches, they come. The hotels are empty, the flights are down, the promised economic windfall has evaporated — but the games, somehow, are on.

I have never believed in nationalism, least of all in sport. I can admire Daley Thompson, Teófilo Stevenson, Torvill and Dean, or Nadia Comăneci as easily as I admire Dorothy Hamill, Roy Jones Jr., or Sugar Ray Leonard. I cheer for grace, for courage, for the athlete who carries themselves with dignity. I may support the United States, but I have always loved David Villa, Xavi, Iniesta, and the whole shimmering geometry of tiki‑taka. I care less about the flag on the shirt than the humanity of the person wearing it.

And though I believe in rules and order, there are limits to what rules can justify.

So the test becomes simple: Will I watch? For all I dislike about nationalism — and for all I oppose in the domestic and foreign policy of the Trump administration — I love a good World Cup match. The knockout rounds are a kind of global theatre: tense, unpredictable, occasionally transcendent.

But will I, like so many others, simply go along? Will I allow the spectacle to wash over the politics that surround it?

It is, in the end, a test of conscience — the kind that asks whether the joy of the game can coexist with the unease of the moment.

Read “Boycott the World Cup?”

Sandbrook’s historical distinction is accurate. But it may also be less reassuring than it first appears.

He certainly recognizes the peril of our current moment. The Trump administration has displayed an authoritarian gravity that has rapidly reshaped the media landscape, sidelined independent journalists, and secured the functional — if often quiet — accommodation of major technology firms, corporate boardrooms, portions of the legal profession, and much of Congress. Yet because Trump lacks a rigid, overarching doctrine, many observers continue to treat his excesses as performance rather than governance.

To be sure, Trump’s record on race is a matter of public record: the housing discrimination lawsuits of the 1970s, his campaign against the Central Park Five, his habitual use of “low IQ” insults, and a career-long tendency toward xenophobic rhetoric. Yet one cannot find a systematic racial philosophy in his speeches comparable to the ideological frameworks that animated the twentieth century’s great dictatorships. Trump is entirely willing to embrace Black, Muslim, Jewish, or Latino supporters — provided they flatter his ego or serve his immediate political utility. His worldview is transactional more than doctrinal.

That distinction matters. But perhaps not in the way many assume.

Some of the policy frameworks surrounding Trump — including elements associated with Project 2025 — reflect a more structured ideological ambition than Trump himself often displays. Yet even that may be secondary to the larger question.

Where Sandbrook’s argument risks understatement is in the assumption that ideology is the primary warning sign.

Authoritarianism does not require a manifesto. It requires an appetite for power and the infrastructure to enforce it. The willingness to deploy masked federal agents, construct large detention systems, pressure institutions, or systematically discredit electoral outcomes behaves much the same regardless of the leader’s internal motivations. A democracy can be weakened just as effectively by a businessman protecting his interests as by a zealot pursuing a vision.

History often teaches us to watch for ideological blueprints. We search for manifestos, grand theories, and explicit declarations of intent. But power does not always arrive wrapped in doctrine. Sometimes it advances through improvisation, personal grievance, loyalty tests, and institutional accommodation.

Even in the 1930s, many observers convinced themselves that rhetoric was merely rhetoric and that existing institutions would impose natural limits before genuine danger emerged. History proved otherwise. The lesson is not that every modern leader resembles the dictators of the past. It is that free societies often underestimate how much can change before the danger becomes unmistakable.

We may not be looking at Germany in 1936. In important respects, the mechanics of our erosion are entirely different. Technology, media concentration, and the speed of modern communication allow institutions to adapt, comply, and self-censor at a pace twentieth-century authoritarians could scarcely have imagined.

Donald Trump does not need ideological fervor to produce damaging outcomes. He needs only a system increasingly willing to accommodate his impulses.

The greatest danger may not be the arrival of a grand ideology. It may be the slow habituation to conduct that would once have seemed extraordinary. Democracies seldom surrender themselves in a single act of abandonment. They adapt. They rationalize. They grow accustomed. And by the time the boundary between the acceptable and the unacceptable has shifted, few can remember precisely where it once stood.

Kristen Welker is receiving plaudits this week for the rarest of journalistic feats: asking a question so straightforward that it caused the president to walk off the set. And what was this devastating inquiry? Not whether he had been unfaithful to his wife. Not whether his bankruptcies should give voters pause about his stewardship of the economy. Not whether his posture toward Iran is influenced by the interests of any lobbying group.

No — her offense was far simpler.

“Sir, there is no evidence for that.”

That such a sentence now requires courage tells you everything about the state of American media.

We are watching venerable institutions wobble. 60 Minutes is being hollowed out. Late‑night comedians are being trimmed back. Reporters like Jim Acosta and Terry Moran — hardly radicals — are attacked for the crime of doing journalism. These are people with long résumés and reputations for seriousness, yet they are treated as if they have wandered into public life by accident.

Welker, for her part, has generally managed to navigate the Trump era with the caution of a tightrope walker — visible, competent, and just far enough from the line of fire to avoid becoming a character in the drama. John Dickerson perfected this art until he was terminated, a reminder that even the most careful journalists can be removed when the winds shift.

But there comes a moment when even the most cautious reporter must step forward. And Welker’s moment came when she asked for something that used to be the price of admission in public life: evidence.

This, apparently, is unforgivable.

A California election is fraudulent because it takes too long to count. Welker herself is corrupt because she asked a follow‑up. The media, in this telling, is not a constitutional safeguard but an inconvenience — the sort of thing one walks away from when it becomes irritating.

It is, of course, the media figure who should remain on the stage.

The deeper problem is that journalists are being isolated one by one. A host here, a correspondent there, each singled out as biased, corrupt, or disloyal. And when the profession does not stand together — across networks, across ideologies — the result is predictable: they are picked off individually, and the presidency is left to operate without scrutiny.

Is it getting harder because so much media is now owned or influenced by people friendly to the president? Possibly. But the alternative is worse: a press corps too intimidated to ask the most basic question in the civic vocabulary.

Is there evidence for that?

If that becomes a firing offense, then the country has a larger problem than a walk‑off interview.

Read “Both Sides-ism”

If we are to speak about matters as consequential as borders, sovereignty, and national responsibility, we should do so with precision. And the real work behind such pronouncements belongs not in commemorative speeches but in the patient, often unglamorous labor of diplomacy—summits, negotiations, and the steady alignment of national policy with international law.

Take immigration. Are we suggesting that sovereign nations no longer have the right to determine their own immigration policies? If so, we should say so plainly. If instead we believe that certain policies abroad materially affect the United States, then we ought to articulate how they do—and pursue remedies through the appropriate channels. And if migration originates in the Middle East or Africa, we must ask what role we intend to play in addressing the underlying conditions. If these dynamics matter to us, then we owe ourselves—and our partners—specificity rather than slogans.

The difficulty with Hegseth’s remarks, and with much of the Trump administration’s rhetoric on these issues, is that it often appears only half‑serious and rarely well‑considered. A friendly domestic media environment can make such statements sound less alarming than they are. Foreign audiences, however, may not know what to make of this mixture of improvisation and bravado. When we wander off script at solemn international events, we should at least speak with precision, remain within our authority, and anchor our words in both U.S. and international law.

Otherwise, our more muscular declarations risk sounding less like principled leadership and more like imperial improvisation—an unsettling posture in a world that badly needs steadiness and calm.

The quarrel over Iran continues to drift, stalled somewhere between indecision and inertia, with no plausible path to success. And now, belatedly, some commentators — David Brooks, Scott Galloway, and Bill Maher among them — have shifted from “let’s see how it plays out” to open criticism of the war. They are not wrong to say it hasn’t worked.

But that is not the point.

The point is the decision.

The decision to go to war is the most consequential act a government can undertake. That is why the Constitution divides responsibility for it. Presidents bring urgency and information. Congress brings consent. Military leaders bring expertise. Allies bring perspective. The process is cumbersome by design because the stakes are irreversible.

There are many reasons the United States avoided direct war with Iran for decades, despite repeated provocations and proxy conflicts. To initiate a war requires more than presidential impulse. It requires legitimacy.

We can argue endlessly about the conduct of a war once it begins. But if the decision itself is made through lawful, deliberative, and collective mechanisms, then even a flawed outcome is at least the product of a system designed to restrain folly. If the decision is made outside those mechanisms, then even a “successful” war corrodes the very order that prevents the powerful from invading the weak at will.

This is where hindsight becomes a trap.

It is easy to oppose a war only after it fails. But that is not judgment; it is autobiography. It tells us nothing about the wisdom of the decision at the moment it was made.

So as new targets of American attention appear — Cuba, Greenland, et cetera — the question is not whether it might eventually “work out.” The question is whether we have asked the only questions that matter:

• Why are we doing this?

• Is it lawful?

• Has Congress been consulted?

• What is the end state?

• What is the limiting principle?

These are not academic concerns. They are the guardrails that prevent power from becoming appetite.

The decision is the whole point.

Let us not wait until later to decide we were against it.

“Can’t Let It Go”

It was funny, but it was also true. We sometimes imagine the Nazi regime as a model of grim efficiency, a machine of perfect coordination. In reality, it was a nest of rivalries, jealousies, and personal vendettas. Their early victories owed less to strategic brilliance than to luck, miscalculation by their enemies, and a willingness to gamble recklessly. Their decision to attack the Soviet Union—like their dash through the Ardennes—was not the product of genius but of astonishing hubris. They were always going to blow it.

And Sandbrook’s quip contains a deeper insight: we often assume that people who share bad intentions will naturally cooperate, but history shows the opposite. Terrible people rarely like one another, and they make even worse colleagues. It is one of the great misunderstandings of authoritarianism—the belief that shared ruthlessness produces unity. More often, it produces chaos.

Some observers today describe the Trump administration as a movement toward a more authoritarian style of leadership—a belief among supporters that unity behind a strong leader is a virtue in itself. Even policies that break sharply with traditional conservative orthodoxy, such as sweeping tariffs or expanded federal policing, have been met with surprising compliance across the board. The assumption seems to be that any future leader will seamlessly inherit this perch, that the media, corporations, and courts will permanently fall in line, and that the movement will remain a well-oiled machine. It is the familiar belief that a strongman guarantees order.

But perhaps not.

Authoritarian movements often fracture not because their opponents defeat them, but because the people inside them cannot stand one another. Many of the figures who rise in such systems do so not through public service but through notoriety—people with long records of unpaid bills, domestic scandals, dubious associations, or public statements that would disqualify them in any normal political culture. These are not the ingredients of durable unity. They are the ingredients of a circular firing squad.

Authoritarianism promises discipline. What it often delivers is chaos.

The people inside such movements may cooperate when it benefits them, or when the leader demands it, but the alliances are brittle. They are transactional, not principled. And when the center weakens—when the leader falters, or the polls shift, or the courts intervene—the factions turn inward. They do not trust one another any more than their critics trust them.

History suggests that leadership built on fear, grievance, or personal loyalty eventually collapses under the weight of its own internal toxicity. But a circular firing squad still fires live ammunition. Long before these movements implode from within, their chaotic power struggles rip through the institutions of the state, leaving lasting wreckage in their wake.

The question is not whether such leadership will ultimately fail. The real question is how much of the country it will take down with it before it does, and whether we can recover afterward.

The case for rearmament is not difficult to understand. NATO’s defenders would argue that peace in Europe was preserved precisely because aggression carried unacceptable costs. Deterrence, in this view, does not prevent war by eliminating weapons but by making their use irrational. The Cold War remained cold not because the major powers trusted one another, but because they feared the consequences of direct conflict.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the assumption that large-scale conventional war in Europe was a relic of the past. Many believed that nuclear weapons had rendered such conflicts unthinkable. Moscow, of course, imagined a two-day operation, not a grinding war. But the lesson remains: what we consider unthinkable is often only untested.

For years, the United States urged NATO members to “pay up,” to spend more on defense. In a century scarred by tens of millions of deaths, such exhortations feel different. We had allowed ourselves to believe that the great age of mobilization was behind us. If peace was durable, then surely resources could be directed toward healthcare, renewable energy, education—anything other than weapons.

Perhaps that was naïve. Perhaps the arc of history bends toward justice only in textbooks. The end of the Cold War and the fading memory of the world wars encouraged a belief that we had learned something permanent. But history rarely grants permanent lessons. It grants only temporary reprieves.

And even if we have learned, others may not share our conclusions. Some states have interests that point toward a different vision of the world—one in which power is asserted rather than balanced, and in which military force remains a tool of national ambition. Their desire for armament does not make them right, but it does make them real.

Yet deterrence contains its own paradox. Nations rarely describe their own military buildup as threatening. They describe it as prudent, defensive, and necessary. The problem is that neighboring states often hear something different. One country’s insurance policy becomes another country’s warning signal.

History suggests that wars are not always caused by weakness. Sometimes they emerge from fear. States arm because they feel insecure. Their neighbors respond for the same reason. Before long, each side sees its own actions as defensive and the other’s as aggressive.

The question, then, is not whether nations should defend themselves. Of course they should.

The question is whether we have become too certain that more weapons necessarily produce more peace.

The decades following the Second World War were shaped by a different aspiration. Great powers would compete, but they would avoid direct confrontation whenever possible. The objective was not conquest but restraint. The Cold War was dangerous, yet much of its diplomacy revolved around preventing rival powers from colliding openly.

Today that assumption appears less secure. Russia has invaded Ukraine. Military solutions have become increasingly attractive in parts of the Middle East. And even in the United States, one occasionally hears discussion of Greenland, the Panama Canal, or Cuba in terms that would have sounded unusual to many postwar statesmen.

History offers evidence for deterrence.

It also offers evidence for arms races, miscalculation, and wars that began because governments mistook preparation for stability.

The danger is not merely that nations may be insufficiently armed.

It is that they may all conclude, at the same time, that safety lies in arming more heavily than their neighbors.

History suggests that this belief has produced both peace and catastrophe.

“Sunday at 11 am”

In Trump’s second term, the tactic has matured—or perhaps metastasized—into something larger. It is no longer reserved for moments when the administration feels cornered. It appears increasingly reflexive, even when the issue at hand is one where policy could be explained, responsibility assumed, or legitimate disagreement addressed.

When reporters raise questions about inflation or affordability, the response is often not a discussion of tariffs, supply chains, deficits, or economic policy. Instead: Who do you work for? That’s fake news. Joe Biden. The subject shifts almost instantly. Inflation ceases to be the topic; the reporter becomes the topic. Likewise, in discussions of Iran, questions about military objectives, costs, risks, or end states are frequently met not with clarification but with suspicion—as though the very act of inquiry were evidence of disloyalty.

That distinction matters.

A government is not obligated to satisfy every critic. Nor must it answer every question perfectly. But democratic government depends upon a basic assumption: that questions themselves are legitimate. Accountability begins with inquiry. Once questioning is treated as inherently hostile, the line between scrutiny and sabotage begins to blur.

Americans have long wondered whether government works for them. That skepticism helped bring Trump to office in the first place. Gridlock, hyper-partisanship, entrenched interests—all contributed to a sense that Washington had stopped solving problems and had become more interested in managing perceptions than producing results.

But the question facing the country now may be more fundamental.

Will government answer questions, or merely manage perceptions?

The focus increasingly appears fixed on the messenger rather than the message, on the question rather than the answer. What began as a tactic of political communication risks becoming a governing philosophy. The challenge is no longer simply persuading supporters that criticism is unfair. It is avoiding criticism altogether by treating criticism itself as suspect.

Democracies require opposition parties. They also require opposition facts. They require journalists, investigators, watchdogs, and ordinary citizens willing to ask uncomfortable questions. None of those institutions are infallible. All are capable of error. But their purpose is not to affirm power. It is to test it.

When a government spends more time interrogating the questioner than answering the question, accountability begins to look less like a function of government than an inconvenience to it.

And governments are ultimately judged not by whether questions are asked, but by how they answer them.

Tony Schwartz has spent years reminding the world that he wrote much of The Art of the Deal—terrible form for a ghostwriter, but forgivable only because the book itself contains nothing especially monumental. The real art, it turns out, is not in the writing but in the announcing. And on that front, Donald Trump has displayed a talent that even his critics, and there are many, have had to acknowledge.

His periodic declarations that a breakthrough with Iran is imminent—or nearly imminent, or perhaps merely conceivable—have done something remarkable: they have kept the markets steady. In a moment when traders might otherwise be pricing in escalation, they are instead parsing presidential hints like tea leaves, treating each closing bell as a referendum on the next morning’s optimism.

It is, in its way, a masterclass in narrative management.

The quarrel with Iran has not gone according to plan, however optimistic that plan may once have been. The United States may yet expend considerable treasure, credibility, and risk merely to restore conditions that existed before the first strike. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz would be an achievement—but only because its closure created the problem in the first place. Under normal circumstances, markets would be sagging under the weight of uncertainty. This is, after all, a stalemate.

And yet they have not sagged. They have held.

Trump’s intermittent announcements have created the sense that resolution is perpetually just ahead. The market behaves as though the story is advancing toward a conclusion, even when events suggest something closer to a holding pattern.

Many Americans see Trump as a man of bluster, a salesman with a gift for exaggeration. But the sales job he has performed around this unhappy stalemate has been, from a purely tactical standpoint, extraordinary. If the goal is to maintain market confidence while pursuing an aggressive policy toward Iran, then the strategy has worked.

Whether the policy succeeds remains uncertain. But as an exercise in sustaining confidence during an increasingly uncomfortable stalemate, the performance has been impressive.

Credit, as the saying goes, where it is due.

“Tom Hopkins and Problem of the Deal”

Even then, the story was becoming harder to sustain. Korea had ended not in victory but in stalemate. Vietnam was moving toward a conclusion no one wished to name. Later would come Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the unsettled, uneasy confrontation with Iran. The ledger has grown more complicated, and the old certainty that America wins its wars is harder to recite with a straight face.

That raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean when a country loses a war?

The question matters because war is not an accident. Nations often choose to wage war. They commit lives, treasure, prestige, and political capital to its pursuit. If victory means something, defeat must mean something as well. And if a conflict ends without clear success, the consequences do not disappear simply because leaders choose different language to describe the outcome.

A stalemate in Iran, should one emerge, would not merely be a military result. It would be a political and diplomatic one. The world would see not only the battlefield but the limits of American power. The same is true of Russia in Ukraine. Modern wars often reveal less about strength than about its boundaries. Defeat, or even prolonged frustration, becomes a form of information. It exposes assumptions, capabilities, weaknesses, and the gap between what nations believe they can accomplish and what they actually can.

This is one reason diplomacy and alliances matter, however frustrating they may be. The United Nations is cumbersome. Alliances are slow. Coalitions require compromise. Partners ask uncomfortable questions and demand justification. In an age accustomed to instant decisions and immediate action, such restraints often feel intolerable.

Yet those very restraints may be among democracy’s greatest strengths.

We often think of alliances as instruments for multiplying power. They are that. But they also serve another purpose: they test assumptions before power is used. Before a nation can persuade its allies, it must first persuade itself. Coalition-building forces leaders to confront questions they might prefer to avoid. It compels governments to explain not merely what they intend to do but why they believe it will succeed.

When nations act alone, they bear alone the consequences of miscalculation. When they act with allies, they share not only burdens but perspectives. The process is maddeningly slow, but it may also be one of the best safeguards against strategic overconfidence.

Perhaps it is better to lose together than to lose alone. Or perhaps the process of building a coalition reduces the likelihood of losing in the first place. The statesmen who shaped the postwar order seemed to understand this. They saw alliances not as obstacles to power but as instruments of wisdom.

Great powers rarely collapse because of a single defeat. More often they are diminished by a succession of conflicts undertaken without clear objectives, without sufficient support, and without a credible vision for what follows the fighting.

The lesson is not that victory is guaranteed when nations act together. History offers no such assurances. Rather, it is that restraint, diplomacy, and coalition-building remain the best available safeguards against the mistakes that turn military campaigns into strategic failures.

The measure of wisdom is not whether a nation can wage war. It is whether it knows when not to.

“Hemisphere of Our Own Discontent”

Those regimes ended, as such regimes tend to, in catastrophe. Stalin endured longer than the others, but the pattern was unmistakable. Yet memories fade, and the old temptations return. Authoritarian leaders are again on the march. Putin and Xi have held power for years, but what is striking is how nations with long democratic traditions have increasingly produced leaders with unmistakably authoritarian instincts — in style if not in structure — Trump, Netanyahu, and for a time Bolsonaro.

There is no great popular hunger for authoritarianism itself. But there is a discernible appetite for the populist strongman — the figure who promises to cut through paralysis, punish the corrupt, and restore a sense of national purpose. Democracies themselves often create the frustrations from which such politics draws its energy: drift, delay, fragmentation, and the growing perception that no one is truly accountable.

And in an age of digital media, amplified by sympathetic technology executives and algorithmic ecosystems, it has become easier to present these figures not as threats to democracy but as expressions of it. The packaging has improved even if the substance has not.

We once assumed that after the fall of the Iron Curtain these debates belonged to the past. It turns out they belong to the human condition. The choice between democratic restraint and authoritarian certainty is not a settled question but a recurring one — a question each generation must answer for itself.

And the argument, as Kennan would remind us, must be waged with seriousness and won with patience.

“When Smart People Disagree”

I sometimes hear a faint echo of 1985 when I say something complimentary about Caitlin Clark online. Back then, a Black college student praising Larry Bird risked being accused of apostasy. Not that any of us ever praised him. Bird, of course, is beloved now. Time has a way of sanding down the edges. Caitlin Clark inspires nothing quite like the old Boston‑versus‑everybody animus, but she does provoke a similar instinct in the public: the urge to find something wrong with her.

She turns the ball over too much.
She hasn’t won a major title.
Other players are more decorated.

All true.

And yet she remains one of the most compelling athletes in America.

Part of the fascination is athletic. Part of it is cultural. Clark seems to provoke debates that extend well beyond basketball.

Part of that is her style of play. Clark attempts passes others would never attempt and takes shots others would never dare take. She plays with visible ambition. Success and failure are both magnified because she constantly operates at the edge of what seems possible. That makes her exhilarating to watch and, inevitably, easy to criticize.

She is also singular. She has pulled NCAA women’s basketball and the WNBA into a brighter spotlight — not only through admiration, but through the friction she generates. Love her or resent the attention she receives, she has expanded the stage, the audience, and the revenue for everyone. That, as the economists say, is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

I can say this with some authority: I never watched the WNBA until Caitlin Clark. Because of her — and the attention orbiting her — I tuned in and watched every game of her rookie season. I was hardly alone.

The latest critique concerns her behavior. She barks at officials. She gestures in frustration. She snaps at her coach and occasionally earns a seat on the bench. She reacts sharply to contact. In other words, she behaves like a highly competitive athlete in the heat of competition.

But American sports have long been generous in their interpretation of male competitiveness. We call it intensity. We call it fire. We call it leadership. A quarterback argues with an official, a point guard slams a chair, a baseball manager erupts from the dugout, and commentators often fold the behavior into the mythology of greatness. We have always been quick to canonize the tempers of our sporting heroes, but in Caitlin Clark’s case we convene a committee.

Clark’s frustrations are subjected to a different level of examination. The scrutiny is not always unfair, but it is often disproportionate. The reaction suggests that we are still negotiating what competitiveness is supposed to look like when it is displayed by a woman who occupies the center of the sports conversation. Much of what is treated as evidence against Clark would attract far less attention if displayed by a celebrated male star. We might criticize the behavior. More often, we would shrug and say he hates losing.

Caitlin Clark has altered the landscape of American sports and media. We cannot seem to take our eyes off her, and she has become a kind of cultural mirror. The reactions she provokes — admiration, irritation, resentment, fascination — tell us as much about ourselves as they do about her.

And that, perhaps, is not merely a story about Caitlin Clark. It is a story about how we decide which forms of ambition, competitiveness, and confidence we celebrate, and which we scrutinize.

Clark may ultimately be remembered not only for the shots she made or the records she broke, but for the arguments she forced the country to have. Few athletes become symbols. Fewer still become symbols while they are still playing.

And that, perhaps, is the real story.

“Life as a Coach.”

It is a message worth remembering on a Sunday morning, especially in a season when our national leadership often seems to regard human beings — immigrants, allies, even neighbors — as inconveniences rather than souls. We live in a time when the loudest voices speak constantly of strength while showing so little tenderness, and speak of greatness while showing so little grace.

But the child in the manger asked none of that from us. He asked for something quieter: that we see one another, that we care for one another, that we refuse to let fear become the organizing principle of our lives.

And so we do what people of conscience have always done.

We keep living.
We keep loving.
We stay involved, even when the world feels unsteady.
We talk with our children about kindness, about courage, about the difference between power and goodness.
We show up for our friends.
We show up when conscience asks it of us.
We vote, because voting is simply another form of hope made public.

None of this is dramatic. None of it will trend or dominate the evening panels. But civilizations are not held together by spectacle. They are held together by ordinary people practicing small acts of decency with stubborn regularity.

The world may feel uncertain. Leadership may disappoint. Policies may wound. But the work of being human continues in kitchens and classrooms and quiet conversations long after the headlines fade.

Goodness is not the property of governments. It belongs, finally, to people.

And so on this Sunday morning, let us remember:

That fear is not a virtue.
That cruelty is not strength.
That dignity belongs to every person who crosses our path.
That the world is still changed by gentleness practiced steadily and without applause.

The child in the manger would ask little more.

“The Church We Inherit, the Church We Choose.”

Some of the finest war films understood this tension. Grand Illusion especially portrayed enemies who remained recognizably human even amid conflict. Even in bitter modern wars, occasional stories emerge of small acts of decency between combatants and prisoners. War is not always Bataan; cruelty is not the only register available to human beings in uniform.

But modern conflict is increasingly framed in absolute moral language. The Cold War was presented as a struggle between freedom and evil empire. The Iraq wars, Afghanistan, and many recent conflicts involving Israel carried similar undertones of civilizational struggle. Strategic disputes become moral crusades. Opponents become embodiments of evil rather than nations pursuing interests, however harshly or cynically.

This is the danger of approaching war through the assumption that the adversary is evil. Our military operates under a Code of Conduct. We submit to the Geneva Conventions and to international norms not because our enemies are always virtuous, but because disciplined nations understand how quickly war drags human beings toward barbarism. The rules exist to keep us from tumbling in. And they work not only because we follow them, but because they create a framework of reciprocity that protects our own soldiers and civilians even when the other side falls short.

The Geneva Conventions are not sentimental. They are practical. They protect our soldiers when captured. They protect civilians when the tables turn. They remind us that the purpose of discipline is not only to win battles but to preserve our own humanity while doing so.

Perhaps, then, the answer is not to take no quarter, but to take a moment — to remember that the line between war and barbarism is thinner than we like to admit, and that the rules we impose on ourselves are often the only things preventing that line from disappearing entirely.

“Having the Cake, Losing the Butcher”

So how do you explain South Carolina holding its ground on its congressional map?

South Carolina has long cultivated a reputation for independence — a certain contrarian streak toward outside authority. Historically, that instinct often served deeply unjust ends, tied to slavery, segregation, and the defense of elite power. But the instinct itself — the reflexive resistance to external pressure — still seems to distinguish the state from some of its southern neighbors. Even today, the state’s political culture carries a faint pride in doing things its own way.

And the gains from redrawing the map were hardly extraordinary. One Democratic seat, perhaps. And the seat in question belonged to Jim Clyburn — a civil-rights icon and, in many ways, a state treasure. What exactly was the payoff? And was it worth the political and legal risk?

Yes, voting had already begun, as it had in other states aligned with the Trump administration’s redistricting push. But South Carolina’s timing was slightly different. Could that have mattered? Or does some old-fashioned instinct still persist — that representation ought to bear at least some resemblance to the popular vote, even if no one says so out loud?

It’s hard to know precisely why South Carolina bucked the trend. Competing explanations can be offered, and each has its own logic. But that, in a sense, is the point. Politics is not physics. States, like people, sometimes behave in ways that defy the models built to predict them.

Politics remains one of the few realms where human beings still surprise the experts.

And that’s why we run the race.

Democracies can survive exaggeration; they’ve done so since the founding. What they cannot survive is the steady erosion of shared standards. Increasingly, accusations are launched without specifying the rule, statute, or procedure allegedly violated. Institutions are condemned before their work is examined. Outcomes are rejected not through legal challenge but through repetition, as if saying something often enough can substitute for proving it.

Consider the phrase “stolen election.” After 2020, Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits. They lost nearly all of them. That doesn’t mean every procedural question raised was illegitimate. It does mean the system functioned as designed: courts reviewed claims, states certified results, and Congress completed its constitutional role. Yet the rhetoric of theft treated these processes as irrelevant. The legal system’s conclusions were overshadowed by a narrative that insisted the outcome was invalid regardless of the evidence.

The same pattern appeared with “Russia hoax.” The public record is clear: Russia sought to influence the 2016 election and preferred Trump’s victory. The Mueller investigation, meanwhile, did not establish criminal conspiracy under federal law. Those two facts can coexist. But political rhetoric collapsed them into a binary — either total exoneration or total fabrication. The nuance that defines legal inquiry was flattened into a slogan.

Impeachment followed a similar trajectory. One could reasonably argue that conditioning congressionally approved aid to Ukraine on political favors constituted impeachable conduct, even if the Senate ultimately declined to remove the president. But the constitutional debate was quickly overtaken by tribal language that treated the process as illegitimate by definition. The legal questions became secondary to the narrative battle surrounding them.

This matters because democratic legitimacy rests not on universal agreement but on confidence in procedure. Citizens don’t have to like every outcome. They do need to believe that accusations correspond to recognizable standards and that institutions operate through law rather than spectacle.

When political language becomes maximalist, the distinctions that sustain democratic life begin to blur. Investigations become persecution. Court rulings become corruption. Election losses become theft. The public loses the ability to tell the difference between genuine abuses of power and ordinary political setbacks.

At that point, persuasion gives way to narrative maintenance — the constant reinforcement of a storyline that must be protected at all costs. And once language stops clarifying reality, it becomes a tool for reshaping it.

Enjoy “The Shape of Loyalty”

World War I produced trenches, tanks, and industrial slaughter. World War II shifted toward carriers, strategic bombing, and nuclear weapons. The decades after brought insurgencies, proxy wars, and asymmetrical conflict. Every era punished armies that clung too tightly to the assumptions of the previous one.

Ukraine may be doing it again.

The war has shown how drones, decentralized communications, commercial technology, and adaptability can offset enormous disadvantages in manpower and materiel. Relatively inexpensive systems now impose staggering costs on far larger and wealthier powers.

The lesson is uncomfortable for traditional military planners.

Modern warfare increasingly rewards flexibility over grandeur. Massive fleets, advanced aircraft, and enormous defense budgets still matter. But procurement cycles are slow, bureaucracies are rigid, and prestige often remains attached to legacy systems while warfare evolves elsewhere.

That is why current American debates matter. The Trump administration often speaks in the language of overwhelming force — battleships, dominance, raw power. There is logic to deterrence through strength. But Ukraine has also demonstrated that agility, improvisation, decentralized systems, and technological adaptation can steadily erode even large conventional advantages.

Future wars may depend less on who spends the most and more on who learns the fastest.

Modern warfare punishes rigidity.

And nations that fail to adapt usually discover their adversaries already have.

And yet this weekend, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered a speech that seemed to forget the audience in front of him. The graduates had earned their place through discipline and study. The speech, by contrast, seemed to arrive without much evidence of either.

It is a strange thing to lecture a diverse class — diverse in race, gender, experience, and perspective — about merit as though one’s own appointment were universally regarded as the obvious product of unmatched qualifications. There were candidates for the position with deeper experience, higher rank, and broader command credentials. The president appointed him, and Congress confirmed him, as is the constitutional process. But few serious observers would describe the selection itself as a triumph of pure meritocracy.

More troubling, many of the claims about the harms of DEI remain weakly supported by serious evidence. In fact, a substantial body of research suggests that widening the pool of qualified candidates strengthens institutions rather than weakens them. The armed forces have long understood this — and have acted on it. Cohesion, after all, is built on competence and trust, not on narrowing the ranks.

Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948. By the time my father graduated from Virginia State University in 1953, he entered the Army through an ROTC program deliberately designed to expand the pool of Black officer candidates. The country benefitted. His 20‑year career took him through three combat tours — Korea, Vietnam twice — and assignments in Thailand and West Germany during tense chapters of the Cold War. A poor Black kid from southern Virginia became a Bronze Star recipient and a lieutenant colonel because the nation made a conscious decision to widen opportunity. And the nation was stronger for it.

That is what a functional diversity program looks like: not a slogan, but a strategy.

Secretary Hegseth gave a similar speech to senior officers in Quantico last year, and it missed the mark then as well. Part of leadership is understanding the mission and the moment. Part of service is knowing when the room requires humility rather than applause lines. And part of stewardship — especially at the highest levels — is reinforcing the unity of the force, not testing its seams.

The graduates deserved a speech equal to the seriousness of their service.

“When America Is Great”

Donald Trump campaigned on avoiding foreign wars. He castigated Democrats for the entanglements of the past. Then he created the so-called Board of Peace, publicly campaigned for the Nobel Prize, and simultaneously escalated confrontations abroad while issuing threats toward Cuba, Greenland, and even Canada. In Venezuela, the United States carried out what was, in effect, a regime-decapitation operation without an international mandate, forcibly removing Nicolás Maduro from power. Meanwhile, the administration has done comparatively little to restrain Russia in Ukraine — a conflict where American influence might actually matter.

The contradictions are difficult to ignore, even for those inclined to squint charitably.

But the concern runs deeper. A “victory” in Iran — whatever that word might mean in this context — risks emboldening the administration to search for new adversaries, real or imagined. Cuba and Greenland have already been rhetorically cast in that role. And many Americans, watching the administration’s governance grow increasingly self-serving, wonder whether any expansion of presidential authority is something to celebrate.

Yet even this anxiety is complicated. The friendly media ecosystem surrounding the administration, combined with a remarkable indifference to cost — financial, human, or geopolitical — means the outcome in Iran may not matter politically at all. If the war becomes expensive, if it drags on, if it ends inconclusively, would that alter the administration’s narrative? Perhaps not. The story, after all, is written before the facts arrive.

Meanwhile, the war is costing Americans dearly: billions of dollars, higher gas prices, and rising prices across the broader economy. One hesitates to wish for a disastrous outcome simply to deny the president a political triumph. But one also hesitates to cheer for a “victory” that may deepen the very conditions that produced the conflict — a cycle in which strategic miscalculation becomes its own justification.

And beneath all of this, real people — Iranian civilians, American service members, regional allies — are paying the price for a conflict whose purpose remains undefined. That fact alone should give us pause, even if official Washington increasingly seems incapable of it.

The deeper challenge is that it is not clear what “winning” would even look like. From the public vantage point, the conflict appears to lack a coherent and executable political objective. Perhaps the administration and its allies hoped the Iranian public would rise up after key leaders were eliminated. That has not happened. Whether out of fear, nationalism, or genuine support for the regime, the hoped-for internal revolt never materialized.

Instead, Iran responded in ways it had previously avoided even after October 7, after the Gaza war, after the Lebanon escalation, and even after the 2025 strike on its nuclear facility. It closed the Strait of Hormuz and struck U.S.-aligned Arab states across the region. Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping lanes and threaten regional infrastructure altered the strategic equation. Perhaps Tehran felt cornered. Perhaps it underestimated its own leverage. Either way, the result increasingly resembles stalemate — with rumors that any eventual negotiated settlement may prove more favorable to Iran than the framework once negotiated under President Obama.

And here is the structural truth that cannot be ignored:

Wars without clear objectives tend to serve the machinery that wages them, not the people who pay for them.

The incentives — political, economic, institutional — run ahead of the strategy.

Which brings us back to the central dilemma:

How does one root for the home team when one cannot discern the rules of the game, the objective, or even the scoreboard?

A ground invasion? Iran has done nothing that would justify such an escalation under any recognizable standard of international law. A campaign to destroy its conventional military? A push for regime change? The administration has not articulated a clear end state, and it is difficult to support — or oppose — a strategy that remains undefined.

This has been the administration’s central problem from the beginning: not merely the morality of its actions, but the absence of any coherent purpose behind them. And it leaves the public in an impossible position. We do not know what we are rooting for. We do not know what we are rooting against.

And in a republic, that confusion is not a minor inconvenience.

It is a warning sign.

1776, Reconsidered.