Cagle World

It’s hard for me to describe how much I once loathed Richard Nixon.

As a college student during the Watergate scandal, I celebrated when he quit on the cusp of impeachment. I firmly believed, along with millions of others, that Nixon was the lowest human being ever elevated to our highest office and his track record of anti-constitutional crimes would never be surpassed.

Jeez were we naive.

Despite his serial abuses and aberrant behavior – bugging his own office, ordering the Watergate coverup, ranting on tape about “the Jews” will stain him for eternity – when you compare Nixon to the current vile authoritarian, the former looks so good I’m tempted to wallow in nostalgia and give the guy his due.

Think about it: At least Nixon wasn’t stupider than a slab of cement. At least he wasn’t a useful idiot of the Russians. At least he didn’t send people to storm the Capitol after narrowly losing the 1960 presidential race. When the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1974, forcing him to release the Oval Office tapes, he quickly complied. When fellow Republicans told him there were sufficient House votes for impeachment and it was time to go, he went. He actually went.

But that’s just for starters. Check out these points of comparison:

– Unlike he who shall not be named, Nixon didn’t work to destroy the mandate of the Environmental Protection Agency. Quite the contrary. He created the EPA, signed the Clean Water Act, and signed the Endangered Species Act. In 1972 he praised America’s “environmental awakening,” and said “the federal government must provide leadership.”

– Unlike the current saboteur of NATO, Nixon worked to keep it strong. In 1969 he called NATO “one of the great successes of the postwar world.” He said “the American commitment to NATO will remain in force and it will remain strong” because it is “more than a military alliance,” it “represents a moral force.”

– Unlike the current enemy of affordable health care, Nixon repeatedly sought to enact sweeping health reforms – “to ensure,” he said in 1971, “that no American family will be prevented from obtaining basic medical care by inability to pay.” Indeed, Nixon’s provisions – employer-mandated insurance, increased federal subsidies – were actually more generous than today’s Obamacare. (They failed because Democrats, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, didn’t think they were liberal enough.)

– Unlike the current guy’s quest to rig the judiciary for the rich and favored, Nixon created the Legal Services Corporation Act. Today, the LSC – a federal nonprofit entity – still provides legal aid to low-income people. When he signed it into law in 1974, he called it a “constructive way to help (the poor) help themselves,” to “protect and preserve a basic right for all Americans.”

– Unlike the current addled warlord, whose ignorant blunderings in Iran will likely accelerate a regional nuclear arms race, Nixon prioritized non-proliferation. He sat down with the Russians to negotiate nuclear arms treaties; for the first time, America and the Soviet Union placed limits on their nuclear weapons arsenals.

– Unlike the current entitled brat, Nixon didn’t have a racist rich daddy to grease his ascent. He grew up poor with no connections in a rural California dust town. His father had a lemon farm that failed. Notwithstanding Nixon’s abundant character flaws, it’s beyond dispute that he worked his rear off to get to Duke Law and beyond, to wind up in places like the Great Wall of China, forging an historic detente with a communist power.

I say all this without minimizing the traits so many of us despised – his lies, his paranoia, his willingness to enlist aides in criminal schemes that landed them in jail. He was ultimately destroyed by his own treachery and taught a generation of Americans to distrust their government. He also ended the draft, championed college loans for the poor, and create the OSHA workplace safety agency. The complexities never cease.

And as loathsome as he often was, he never inspired eight million Americans to flood the streets against him on a single day in all 50 states. That alone tells the tale.

Some 30 years ago, I covered an event at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. Walking the grounds with a colleague, I said, “Hey, isn’t he buried around here somewhere?” My companion said, “You’re standing on him.” I leapt as if my feet had been scorched. I looked down and, yes, there he was. Today, acknowledging his upside, I owe him a semi-salute.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

On Saturday, when Trump feted the death of Robert Mueller with sociopathic glee (“Good, I’m glad he’s dead”), I asked myself the same question that I’ve pondered for years: Didn’t his mother ever wash his mouth out with soap?

The mere act of reading his “Truth” Social post left me feeling dirty. Was there not even a millimeter of decency in the man, just enough to grudgingly acknowledge in a word or phrase that Mueller had devoted his life to making this country great? Was that too much to ask?

Why bother.

The ostensible reason for Trump’s delight was the demise of a guy who dared to challenge him. What few people in the United States of Amnesia seem to remember is Mueller, as special counsel, uncovered multiple damaging truths about Trump’s ascent: A hostile foreign power had invaded the U.S. electoral process in a systematic bid to elect him; the Trump campaign willingly accepted that help with the expectation of benefiting from it; when federal investigators tried to find out what happened, the Trump White House repeatedly and systematically lied about it; and Trump himself personally engaged in multiple acts of obstruction. So said Mueller’s final report in 2019. Few took the time to read it.

Mueller was everything that Trump is not. Mueller’s exemplary personal code – honor, duty, public service, selfless sacrifice, the stuff of American heroism – is unfathomable to a global pariah, someone who ran a third time for president in a bid to feather his own nest and evade federal prosecution.

Vietnam is where their characters sharply diverge. Trump took four education deferments plus an I-Y medical deferment for fake bone spurs in order to dodge the draft. Mueller volunteered for the Marines, and underwent knee surgery in order to ensure that he could go. Trump joked on Howard Stern’s show that staying home and “screwing a lot of women” was his “personal Vietnam.” Mueller led a rifle platoon in combat, in a province with some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, and was rescuing wounded Marines when an AK-47 bullet hit his thigh.

Mueller made it home and embarked on a life of public service. A lifelong Republican, he oversaw federal criminal prosecutions as an assistant U.S. attorney general for the first George Bush, and later served as a homicide prosecutor in Washington during D.C.’s early ‘90s crime wave. He was tapped by the second George Bush to run the FBI, taking the helm one week before 9/11. He was confirmed 98-0 by the Senate, and when Barack Obama extended his tenure he was confirmed 100-0. He overhauled the FBI and prioritized the fight against terrorism. We’ll never know many domestic plots Mueller and his team may have foiled.

Mueller may be the last of a vanishing species: The nonpartisan career public servant who was beyond reproach, someone who puts country over party, reticence over recklessness, selflessness over self-interest, with abiding respect for the rule of law and its institutional guardrails. Given the toxic polarization that afflicts us today, it’s almost impossible to conjure anyone with Mueller’s gravitas.

Sadly, Americans who are nominally familiar with Mueller know only about his final actions – charting Russian interference and the 2016 Trump campaign’s complicity, while refusing to recommend Trump be criminally indicted. As an institutionalist, he honored a Justice Department memo that warned against charging a sitting president. He testified oh so carefully – too carefully for the Trump era’s smashmouth politics – that “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” But Trump spun that as “TOTAL EXONERATION.”

Mueller – hewing to proper channels, exuding faith in the system – said it was Congress’ duty to decide whether Trump’s “wrongdoing” warranted impeachment and removal. He teed it up by saying, “When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to the investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.” But Trump’s congressional lickspittles slammed the brakes on that.

So today, we’re left with the amoral sinkhole’s celebration of Mueller’s passing. But it would be a mistake to heap our animus on him alone. The very fact that 77 million voters decided to rehire him – despite the endless evidence of his abysmally low behavior – speaks to the degradation of our national character, to the death of consensus civility, to a broad rebuke of all that the deceased stood for.

We can safely assume Mueller wouldn’t want us to accelerate the decline by responding in kind, and we can honor him best by not doing so. But if marchers at the next No Kings rally show up with the same placards as last time – most notably, “Cholesterol, Do Your Job” – many people will cheer the prospect. Robert Mueller’s values are in eclipse and the thirst for payback can’t be quenched. This is Trump’s America and we are diminished by it.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

Let’s rewind the clock a few weeks and revisit Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, because one particular passage strikes me in hindsight as delectably delicious:

“Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor, is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states. And in some places, $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.”

If we ignore the pathological liar’s most blatant lie – that he “saw” an Iowa station pump a gallon for a buck 85 – we can rightly conclude that this guy was nervous about the issue of affordability. He has long boasted that his 2024 win was greased in part by voters’ concerns about inflation, and indeed he has long used gas prices as a metric for the health (or ill health) of the American economy.

Yet here he is today – having blundered into a Middle East war via his toxic trifecta of impulsiveness, incompetence, and ignorance – presiding over a national pandemic of pain at the pump, with prices spiking an average of 74 cents a gallon in the last two weeks (roughly 27 percent). That translates to $3.72 for unleaded. And it’s clear he has no clue what to do about it.

Trump is so far over his head, he’d drown in a kiddie pool.

It has long been axiomatic in American politics that the incumbent party takes a hit when gas prices go north. If that’s still true, swing-voting independents and non-MAGA Republicans might take their revenge on Trump and his congressional lickspittles in the November midterm elections.

Heck, even the most MAGA-fied motorists should be in high dudgeon about the war tax being levied on their wallets. It should be easy to connect dot A (the warlord’s impetuous actions) to dot B (the economic consequences), but I have no faith the cultists will ever wake up.

The good news is that we may not need them.

Trump’s new war is reportedly the most unpopular foreign adventure in the history of polling, thanks to a massive thumbs-down verdict from independents – with a key assist from many non-MAGA Republicans. The cost to consumers is already emblazoned on every gas sign at every highway exit and suburban street corner, where there’s no choice but to pay up.

Thanks to Trump, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of the world’s oil is transported, has triggered “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” That’s according to the International Energy Agency, which represents 32 member nations and reports basic facts without kissing Trump’s rump.

No wonder he has been desperately pleading for help to reopen the Strait, begging all the nations he has been relentlessly dissing. Naturally, they’ve told him to buzz off.

The clock is ticking, because if this war becomes open-ended, spiking oil prices will inflate prices across a broad range of consumer goods. Oil is the key ingredient in the industrial processes that churn out the stuff we buy, like food and medicine.

But for now it’s all about the gas, the warflation at the pump, and what’s truly priceless are the rationalizations being offered by Trump’s hapless toadies on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Mike Johnson says the 27 percent price hike is just a “blip.” Florida congressman Aaron Bean says the price hike is like “street repair. There comes a day when they release the cones and whatnot, and it’s smooth and easy and widened and safer, and that’s what’s happening.” Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker said, “The public understands the necessity of what we’re doing,” a claim that flunks reality.

Nobody, least of all Trump, knows what will happen to warflation in the months ahead. But unless Trump can find a way to rig the midterm congressional elections in his favor, it’s safe to predict that voters outside the MAGA cult will give him a beatdown and drive the Republicans from power in one or both chambers.

We’ve been whacked at the gas pump, but, more importantly, our consciences have been stirred. At the Oscars, the best acceptance speech was delivered by a documentary filmmaker, David Borenstein. While referencing his winning entry about Russian tyranny, he said this:

“What we saw when working with this footage – it’s that you lose (your country) through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it, we all face a moral choice.”

Our choice, by now, should be obvious.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

“The rank deceptions, the slippery wordplay, the willful ignorance…” That’s a succinct description of the Trump regime’s bumbling bid to win our support for war in Iran.

But hang on a sec. I wrote those words a long time ago, to describe George W. Bush’s fake rationales for his invasion of Iraq – the weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, the imminent threat that didn’t exist, and so much more.

If Bush and his aides proved the old adage that truth is the first casualty of war, then let history record the MAGA gang has already kidnapped truth, bombed it to smithereens and cast its ashes to the wind.

The dictionary defines the word imminent as something that’s “about to happen,” but the MAGA dictionary renders all timelines meaningless. Trump poodle Lindsey Graham says Iran is building ballistic missiles that could reach us “eventually.” Trump propaganda minister Karoline Leavitt said ballistic missiles could “pose a risk” to us “one day.” Pentagon beefcake Pete Hegseth defined imminent as any future “pathway” to a nuke, and said Iran could maybe “eventually get to a place” where they could build a “shield” to protect nukes. Even though Trump said last June that he’d already “obliterated” Iran’s ability to build nukes.

Even Bret Stephens, one of the New York Times’ in-house war hawks, lamented Trump has done “a terrible job explaining himself. Americans have a right to know why he’s putting service members in harm’s way…Do you really trust Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to fight and finish this war?”

But wait, is it even a “war”? Not according to the MAGA congressional lickspittles. If they were to embrace that word, they might be compelled to assert some congressional authority – but that would be unthinkable. So instead they’re calling it “an operation,” or “a mission,” or “hostilities,” although  Oklahoma senator and future Homeland Security boss Markwayne Mullin slipped the other day when he declared “this is war,” but quickly said, “That was a misspoke.”

All that wimpy wordplay is out of sync with the warlord, who keeps using the W-word and says more Americans will die, as “often happens in war.” (Pretty brave for a guy who dodged Vietnam with a note from his doctor.)

The Feb. 28 bombing deaths of Iranian schoolchildren meets the criteria of war. Video evidence strongly points to an American strike. Trump quickly decreed without a shred of evidence “it was done by Iran,” but his BS was too odorous even for Hegseth, who simply said, “We’re investigating.” (Don’t hold your breath.)

And who started this war/operation/mission, anyway? Early last week, doormat Marco Rubio said it was all Israel’s doing: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” so “we went proactively in a defensive way.” But a day later, Trump yanked the mat from beneath Rubio’s feet and told reporters,  “No. I might have forced their hand.” Whereupon Rubio, when reminded by reporters later that day of what he’d said about Israel the previous day, insisted he’d never said it in the first place.

What about the end game? While Hegseth said at the outset this was “not a so-called regime change war,” Trump called for regime change and called on the Iranian people to “take over your government…It will be yours to take.” But late last week Trump said it wasn’t really up to the Iranian people because “we want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran.” Over the weekend he said he’d be happy to install an undemocratic religious leader who treats America “fairly.” That sounds a lot like regime change, the precise opposite of what Hegseth said. And Trump’s regime change fantasy seems doomed to fail anyway; a classified prewar intelligence report warned that even a major assault on Iran would be unlikely to oust its military and clerical establishment.

There’s also no word how long this war might last, because planning is not his forte. He says the war could last “four or five weeks” or “far long than that,” while the U.S. Central Command is saying at least 100 days or maybe through the end of September.

We have traveled light years from the era when people of stature charted our national course, comported themselves with gravitas, and said things like this: “I hate war as only a soldier has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Thank you, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

An open letter to MAGA cultists everywhere:

I know the next two sentences will strike you as elitist, but so be it. Anyone who’s shocked by your Sun God’s illegal military thrust into Iran is clearly stupider than a box of rocks. Anyone who actually took him at face value when he promised not to wage foreign wars should be required to take a course in remedial cognition.

You pined for a “peace” prez who’d free us from military entanglements in faraway places you’d be hard pressed to find on a map. You clapped like trained seals whenever He played the dove in his rallies. But since you gargled his swill and deemed it delicious, I have a question for you:

Happy now?

Clearly, some of you are not. Marjorie Taylor Greene says you’re “going to be force fed and gaslighted” by the Trump regime’s “sick f–ing liars.” Andrew Tate, king of the MAGA manosphere, yells on social media, “NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.” Tucker Carlson says Trump’s decision to bomb Iran is “disgusting and evil.” Natalie Winters, who co-hosts Steve Bannon’s MAGA podcast, says Trump hasn’t explained his attack on Iran: “The messaging, much like the Epstein files, is all over the place.”

So I have to believe, at minimum, you and your fellow cultists are a tad confused by what’s going on. Didn’t your leader announce, just last year, that “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated,” and that any reports to the contrary were “fake news”? Perhaps right now you’re feeling just a wee bit…dare I suggest it…betrayed?

Nevertheless, having watched you these last 10 years, I assume most of you will un-think such unpleasant thoughts, and that, with all deliberate speed, you will do whatever needs to be done, in the neurons between your ears, to align yourself with the whims of the war lord.

At first that mental exercise may not be easy, given everything he has long said. Like in 2016 when he said that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was “a big fat mistake.”

Like at the 2016 Republican convention where he decreed “we must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.”

Like in 2019 when he blared on social media “GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.”

Like in 2024 when he ridiculed “war hawks sitting in a nice building in Washington saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”

Like in 2024 when he sent out campaign surrogates to say that “a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them,” and that “Trump = Peace.”

Heck, we can go all the way back to 2012 and 2013 to resurrect these tweeted beauts: “Obama will some day attack Iran to show how tough he is” and “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in a tailspin – watch for him to launch a strike in…Iran.”

But I suspect you will find ways to tell yourselves he was really playing a brilliant game of 10-dimensional chess.

You’ll tell yourselves his refusal to consult Congress – to make a public case for war, to identify an imminent threat – is just what any CEO would do when you run government like a business. Besides, he’ll fix Congress in November with his plans for election integrity.

You’ll tell yourselves the timing of his new war, done in cahoots with the manifestly corrupt Israeli leader, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his tailspinning poll numbers, or with the revelation key Epstein files detailing FBI interviews with an underage sex assault accuser are mysteriously nowhere to be found.

Your fealty should not be enough, however. Now you must act on your realigned beliefs. Get yourselves to the nearest military recruitment office and sign up for duty. Don’t claim your bone spurs hurt.

Better yet, make it crystal clear you won’t fight with any gays, any women, any wrong-colored people, anyone with a whiff of DEI. This war of choice should be the province of white conservative Christian men, the core of the MAGA corps, and if you indeed fit that profile, you should man up and charge across that ocean with fire and brimstone. Put your bodies on the line for what you rationalize. You bought your god’s BS, you own it, and you should be willing to die for it. And if you win a Purple Heart, mail it to the White House because he’ll want to wear it.

And if you land in Iran and get greeted as liberators, bear one thing in mind. He’ll need manly muscle to build a Trump Teheran hotel. Just don’t expect to get paid.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

It’s nice the U.S. Supreme Court decided the other day to take Donald Trump to the woodshed and school him on the Constitution.

Two cheers to the high court for finally (albeit belatedly) doing something reining in Trump a tad. John Roberts’ majority opinion – employing strict constructionism, a traditional conservative tenet – pointed out Trump’s wanton global tariffs were illegal because (1) the 1977 “emergency” law he has used as a fig leaf never once mentions the word tariff, and (2) a tariff is a tax, and Congress alone has the power to tax – as stipulated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Indeed, the Founding Fathers “gave Congress alone ‘access to the pockets of the people.’”

Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, in a concurring opinion, even tried to hose down the intemperate toddler: “Yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man,” and hopefully some day anyone “disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.”

Nice argument – with a big hitch. The MAGA Congress has long been loath to indulge its “deliberative nature” as a co-equal branch of government. Until recently, it uttered barely a peep as Trump careened around the world slapping hefty tariffs on foreign goods, punishing whatever countries displeased him for whatever whimsical reason. Those tariffs were passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices – as de facto taxes.

And, big surprise, we won’t be getting that tax money back.

The 2024 candidate who promised to defeat inflation has instead exacerbated it. The candidate who told voters this planned tariffs were “not going to be a cost to you” was either cognitively clueless or intentionally lying. According to a new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 90 percent of the 2025 tariffs’ “economic burden” fell on U.S. firms and us consumers. Especially those of us who buy things like home furnishings, furniture, bedding, coffee, toys, and flatware.

Some prominent Democrats, on our behalf, are publicly demanding Trump send us refunds. That’s a worthy message, assuming Democrats can sustain it, because it would remind midterm voters about Trump’s perfidy. But vocal Democrats like J. B. Pritzker and Elizabeth Warren know darn well we’ll be aced out. Hundreds of importers may get refunds – many of them, including Costco, Toyota, J. Crew and Crocs, started suing for refunds before the high court even ruled – but there’s broad agreement among economic experts that little or none of that money, reportedly totaling $175 billion, will trickle down to us little people.

Has Trump said a word about consumer refunds? As if. In his mind (or what remains of it) that would make him look weak and be tantamount to admitting failure. His brand is to never give an inch, even though 64 percent of Americans dislike his handling of tariffs.

His only play is to double down. He’s trying to circumvent the high court by imposing 15 percent tariffs via a different provision – namely, a section of a 1974 law that requires tariffs to expire in 150 days. He can let them lapse, then restart the clock – unless the courts tell him to knock it off. That would happen only after new lawsuits slog through the judicial system.

Meanwhile, totally in character, he smeared the high court majority, including his appointees, as “fools and lapdogs,” as “very unpatriotic,” as tools of foreign interests. Never before has a president spewed such vile demagoguery, denouncing the judges as traitors. But in this benighted era, it was just another Friday.

The end result, as in so many MAGA realms, is chaos. Natasha Sarin, president of the Budget Lab at Yale, wonders, “How should people budget for their families in the face of this much (economic) uncertainty?”

Trump’s ongoing tariff con has left the business world in the lurch. Nobody knows how to plan for the future. Nobody knows whether they should absorb costs, cut or expand inventory, brace for more Trump levies, or fear retaliatory tariffs from (former) allies.

Ron Kurnik, who owns a Michigan coffee company, tells Fortune magazine, “It’s like a nightmare we just want to wake up from.” Join the club, pal.

I’m reminded of something Tony Soprano once said: “I’m like King Midas in reverse. Everything I touch turns to s–.”

How nice it would be if Trump had even a smidgen of Tony’s self awareness.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

I found it perversely entertaining watching shrieking she-devil Pam Bondi as she sought to defend her dirtbag tenure at the Department of Pedophile Protection.

She made the Wicked Witch of the West look like Mother Teresa. Any second I expected her to vow vengeance against her congressional inquisitors, a la “I’ll get you and your little dog too,” in the service of her MAGA-cult quest to run the Justice Department as a criminal defense firm for rich and powerful perverts.

I suddenly found myself pining for the likes of Janet Reno.

Now you’re thinking: Janet Reno?!

Trust me, you want to hear about Reno. It’s a new way to assess Bondi.

If you know or remember anything about Reno, chances are it was her stolidity and six-foot-one stature as satirized in “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” on “Saturday Night Live. “They made fun of her serious mien – but that was her superpower. On the job she was so serious about protecting Justice’s independence from White House interference and influence that – get this! – she rarely even spoke with the president who appointed her. And vice versa.

Imagine such a thing. Unlike Bondi, who’s chained by choice to Jabba the Hut, Reno was so conscientiously distant from Bill Clinton his aides nicknamed her the Martian. Not only did Reno refuse to take orders from Clinton, not only did she announce policy decisions without clearing them with Clinton, she also seemed not to care what he thought of her. Reporters back in the day wrote she was “indifferent to the judgment of others,” and that, in the words of former top deputy Walter Dellinger, she was “not driven by the need for approval.”

Reno wasn’t perfect, of course. In 1993 she OK’d an FBI raid of a religious cult compound in Waco, Texas, which ended when a fire killed nearly 80 people, including kids. In 2000 she ordered federal agents to forcibly remove six-year-old refugee Elián González from his relatives’ home in Miami and return the boy to his dad in communist Cuba, a decision that infuriated Republicans.

But ponder this key factoid: Reno pissed off Clinton by appointing five independent counsels to investigate people in his own Cabinet – and, most famously, to investigate him.

While testifying on Capitol Hill (without trash talk), Reno defended her use of special counsels: “There is an inherent conflict whenever senior executive branch officials are to be investigated by the [Justice] department and its appointed head, the Attorney General…Public support for our government is predicated on the belief that the government is fair and just.”

Give that last sentence a second read. Feeling nostalgic yet?

Reno green-lit special counsel probes of four Clinton Cabinet members (Mike Espy, Ron Brown, Alexis Herman, Henry Cisneros), and she triggered the probe of Bill and Hillary’s roles in the failed Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater. That was a penny-ante scandal (there was no evidence of Clinton criminality), but the special counsel who ran that probe – a guy named Kenneth Starr – stayed on the job long enough to latch onto the Monica Lewinsky sex saga. And we know how that went.

Clinton wanted to dump Reno at the start of his second term and install a friendlier attorney general. But she announced she was staying, and Clinton decided it wasn’t worth a political kerfuffle to force her out. He didn’t want people to think or perceive that he was putting his thumb on the scales of justice.

Instead he quietly seethed, especially about his friend Henry Cisneros. Reno targeted Cisneros for special treatment just because he’d allegedly made false statements to the FBI during a routine background check about some money he’d paid to an ex-girlfriend. Compared to the unprecedented corruption and coverups that Bondi aids and abets, Cisneros’ alleged misdeeds barely register as a parking ticket. Yet he was put through the wringer. Reno’s special counsel spent four years on that case, just to have Cisneros plead guilty to a misdemeanor.

OK, so maybe Reno was a tad too vigilant at times. But just imagine how she would’ve dealt with overwhelming evidence that rich brutes had serially raped underage girls. If an attorney general with Reno’s moral compass was on the job today, and the sitting president was raking in money from the crypto industry, there’s no way that such a person would’ve fired most of the Justice Department’s cryptocurrency enforcement team. Bondi has already done the deed.

But here’s the starkest contrast between Reno’s era and our current dystopia: Clinton appointed a strong, independent woman who charted her own course with a moral compass, while Trump did the opposite. Bondi, in the words of ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, personifies “how Donald likes his women: cheap, plastic and servile.”

She is programmed for mindless servility; that’s not how her department is supposed to function. If we do manage to survive this era, Justice will need to reclaim its mission of prosecuting without fear or favor. It should channel Janet Reno’s independent spirit to dispel the stink of MAGA fascism. That would go a long way toward re-balancing the scales.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

My friends would tell you I have a freakish memory. On the up side, I know the date of the Mets-Pirates double-header I saw at Shea Stadium (July 3, 1966), and I know the date I was hiking the rim of a canyon in Yellowstone (July 30, 1977).

But on the downside, sadly, I remember the first time I ever heard of Donald Trump.

It was Oct. 16, 1973, in the small Connecticut newsroom where I worked. I was leafing through the New York Times and saw this headline: “Major Landlord Accused Of Anti-black Bias in City.” According to the story, the Justice Department was suing the Trump Management Corp. for refusing to rent any units to Black applicants, thus violating federal law.

Young Donald, corporation president, said the charges were “ridiculous.” I muttered “guy’s a racist” and turned the page.

A court battle ensued. Trump’s mobbed-up lawyer, Roy Cohn, complained the government was harassing his client. But a key Trump employee testified he’d been ordered to tag Black rental applications with a big letter “C” for “colored.” Two years later, in 1975, Donald struck a deal. He promised the feds in writing in the future he would not discriminate to renters of color.

I saw that news story as well, but I basically forgot that Trump existed until 1991, when a former Trump Plaza president named John O’Donnell wrote a book and quoted his old boss as saying that “laziness is a trait in Blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

So naturally it’s no surprise that Trump (or a “staffer”) posted an image depicting the Obamas as apes.

And of course it’s no surprise that he refused to apologize, decreeing that “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”

“Character is destiny,” as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, and Trump’s lifelong lowlife racism was gifted to him by his racist dad. The incidents are endless – and not just the big-ticket items, like his lie Barack was foreign-born and thus not a real American. In the fall of 2015, when Trump was rapidly ascending in the Republican polls, I read a New Yorker piece about his tenure in Atlantic City. It quoted Kip Brown, a former Trump employe who was Black: “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the Black people off the floor…They put us all in the back.”

Did that anecdote go viral? Quite the opposite. Did Trump suffer politically when he blared his racism from the rooftops in 2016, sliming all Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and retweeting a long string of supportive messages from white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Again quite the opposite. In fact – you can look it up – white Americans backed him in three successive elections. In 2016, he won 54 percent of the white vote. In 2020, he won 55 percent. In 2024, he won 55 percent.

Clearly, most whites couldn’t care less when he depicts minorities as less than fully human – referring to Black district attorneys as “animals,” lying that Haitians in Ohio are eating the dogs and cats, demanding four congresswomen of color (all U.S. citizens, three born in America) should “go back to where they came from,” denouncing Kamala Harris as “low IQ” and “lazy as hell” (there’s that laziness thing again)… and those are just random highlights from 2024. So why shouldn’t he post an image of the Obamas as apes? He’s instinctively in sync with the American id.

There’s no political method to his madness. He’s just hard-wired for hate, as he has always been. He can’t help himself. He alleviates his raging insecurities with pseudoscience. His racist expressionism is as primal as one’s urge to visit the toilet.

If a mere “staffer” really posted the ape image, he or she did so in the confident belief Trump would deem it worthy. And why should he bother to rein in his racism anyway? Racism is still his secret sauce. It helped grease his path to power. Now he’s free to roll in the gutter, indulge his lowest instincts, and embed racism as national policy.

The ape image has been deleted, but weeks before it was posted he had already translated his attitude into action. In a (failed) bid to ensure we not even speak of slavery anymore, he dispatched the National Park Service to tear down the slavery exhibits at George Washington’s presidential home in Philadelphia.

It’s a waste of time to hope the ape episode will compel his fervent supporters to rethink their fealty. They’re like the Frank Sinatra fans of yesteryear. Comedian Mike Birbiglia likes to tell the (true) story about his aunt, who went with some friends to a Sinatra concert in Buffalo. They went to the stage door. When Sinatra emerged they yelled, “We love you, Frankie!” He took one look and yelled, “Out of my way, you fat pigs!” Their response: “We love you, Frankie!”

Core MAGA fans aside, I suspect a majority of Americans will cheer Trump’s exit from office however it may occur. Cursed as I am with my freakish nature, I know I’ll forever remember the date, day of the week, hour, and minute. I bet I won’t be alone.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

Let’s talk about the F-word.

Not the one uttered 269 times in “Reservoir Dogs” and 569 times in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

I’m talking about the one that should be on everyone’s lips – because it so concisely describes our current hellhole and it’s long past time to mince words. Especially this particular word, one deployed by  veteran conservative attorney and evangelical Christian David French:

“We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but (the) Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal…They went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power regardless of the rule of law.”

That’s where we are, folks. That’s why word “fascist” is now seriously (albeit belatedly) in circulation. Commentator Jennifer Rubin, who rose to prominence as a staunch conservative voice, is urging Americans to “mount even greater assaults on the Trump fascist enterprise.” Jonathan Rauch, the veteran political observer, had long refused to invoke the word – until now: “When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it.”

It’s about time.

The blatantly obvious has finally become impossible to deny or ignore. The summary execution of U.S. citizens by lawless paramilitary goons, the mass surveillance of protesters and dissenters, the MAGA seizure of ballots in a Democratic Georgia stronghold (a dress rehearsal for MAGA assaults on the 2026 midterm tallies), the federal arrest of two independent journalists… It’s all happening, the fascists in power are turning the screws, and nobody is safe.

Some prominent ex-Trump employees openly used the F-word, yet still people didn’t listen. Or perhaps, thanks to our fractured media climate, they never heard the warnings. Mark Milley, who served Trump as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 2024 he was “fascist to the core.” So did John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff.

Knowing this, we could’ve shut the fascists down via the ballot box, in 2024. It was all for naught, for many reasons:

– Because we’re so polarized, it’s near impossible to sway anyone’s mind.

– When millions of Americans hear the F-word, they associate it with swastikas in grainy black and white on the History Channel – something remote in time and foreign by definition.

– Over the years, the F-word has been invoked with such abandon that for many it has been leached of all meaning. Back in my college days, during the last phase of the Vietnam war, cops were routinely (and idiotically) derided as “fascist pigs.” George W. Bush was stupidly denounced as a fascist.

– We’re a very naive people. Timothy Snyder, a top expert on fascism, explained this two years ago: “We lack the experience of the collapse of the republic. And now we are confronted with people in power who wish to bring it down…As soon as the collapse of the German republic in 1933 is evoked, American voices commence a fake lament – America is uniquely good, so nothing about Nazis can ever apply, and/or Hitler was uniquely evil and so nothing concerning him is relevant.”

Granted, many of the 77 million voters who re-hired the fascist did so because they were concerned about illegal immigration and sincerely believed that he would mass-deport the people who lacked the proper paperwork. But it required only minimal cognition to recognize that he would enforce his mandate in a fascistic manner.

I have to assume some of those are Trump voters are now saying, “Gee, I didn’t vote for this!” But, tempting as it may be to denounce them, the better choice in this dire time of crisis is to welcome them. The mission to salvage American democracy must be bipartisan.

And there are reasons to be encouraged.

Minnesotans have shown what feet on the street can do. Even Congress is resisting his quest to make ICE his primary instrument of terror. Various election-monitoring groups intend to foil his plot to rig the midterms – and voters are already pushing back, as evidenced by what happened this weekend in a Texas state Senate election. Back in 2022, voters in that reliably red district had elected a Republican by a landslide margin of 20 points. In 2024 voters there had favored Trump by 17 points. But in this weekend’s special election, the Democratic state Senate candidate decimated his Trump-endorsed opponent by 14 points. In an upscale suburban district.

Translation: Unlike Adolf Hitler, who speedily destroyed German democracy in 1933 with barely a ripple of public dissent, Trump’s fascism is broadly unpopular, more so with each passing week. The fervent hope, among resistants, is that his latest brand will ultimately go bust, like Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump Shuttle.

To rephrase Dylan Thomas, those of us who still revere democracy will not go gentle into that good night.

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]

Given what’s going on in Minnesota – another day, another ICE execution – it’s understandable few have noticed the latest authoritarian move to suppress vital information and deny us the right to judge it for ourselves.

I want to revisit a chain of events that occurred from 2021 to 2023, so please indulge me. I promise to connect the dots to our dire present day.

You may remember when Trump transitioned in 2021 to the status of private citizen, he stole hundreds of classified documents and spirited them to Mar-a-Lago. After umpteen federal demands that he return what he stole, he was indicted in 2023 by a federal grand jury on 38 counts of violating the Espionage Act, obstructing justice, and crafting a coverup. According to the indictment, the purloined material exposed “defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to nuclear attack,” thereby putting “at risk the national security of the United States.”

Federal sleuth Jack Smith and his team wrote a comprehensive final report believed to go far beyond the stark details in the indictment. But the MAGA regime refuses to release it.

And early last week, a Trump lawyer asked the courts to bury the report forever. His despotic client wants to block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees,” from sharing the findings with those of us who wish to read them.

Trump’s goal is to erase this sordid episode from history’s ledger for all time, regardless of whether this country regains its senses down the road.

I can see why. Thefts and coverups don’t play well with sane observers. Back when the classified doc case dominated the news, he was savaged in the polls abd assailed even by some conservatives. In 2022, Karl Rove went on Fox News and said: “None of these government documents are his to be taken. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 you cannot take original documents out of the White House when you leave…It’s verboten under the law.” A year later Trump falsely claimed, “I have every right to have those boxes” – but conservative talk show host Erick Erickson said otherwise: “Game over, legally. What an idiot.”

But wait, I was talking about Jack Smith. Last Thursday, the ex-special counsel testified in a public House hearing – but only about the Trump indictment that covered the events of Jan. 6. He was barred from mentioning the classified documents case because his report is under seal down in Florida (or, in everyday parlance, suppressed) by MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon. Her longstanding order to squelch the report is set to expire on Feb. 24,  hence Trump’s newly filed quest for a permanent ban. In his lawyer’s words, lifting the ban and allowing us to read the report would “irreparably harm President Trump.” (There’s a legal doctrine known as consciousness of guilt. His lawyer’s words suggest it.)

My broader point is the MAGA regime is not merely murdering truth via a tsunami of lies; it’s also doing so via omission. Burying the report on Trump’s theft of classified docs, an unprecedented act by an ex-president, is a classic (albeit overlooked) example of state-sanctioned silence. Erasure of history – deciding what it deems we are not fit to know – is a common authoritarian crime.

That’s the play in Minnesota, where the regime isn’t likely to write a factual report on the execution of Renee Good. That’s what happening with the Epstein files, only a fraction of which has been released despite a law-ordered Dec. 19 deadline. That’s the deal in Philadelphia, where Trump’s national park workers were ordered to remove the slavery exhibit at The President’s House, because apparently we can’t be trusted to judge George Washington’s flaws as a man in tandem with his greatness as a statesman.

The good news is millions of us do not wish to be deaf, dumb, and blind.

We’ve already seen the videos of Good’s final moments. We’ve already seen the videos of Alex Pretti’s execution, and kudos to the eyewitnesses who’ve surfaced to stop the MAGA feds from suppressing the truth. And we’ve already seen the photos of illegally stolen documents piled next to a toilet at Mar-a-Lago. And we’ve already seen Trump’s sexually suggestive birthday card to his pedophile pal. And we already know that slavery is a dark facet of the American saga; the protest signage at the Philadelphia site is proof that racist erasures won’t render us retroactively ignorant.

And we can draw strength from sages who have weathered oppression. One warning, from the late Soviet and Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, seems especially apt:

“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”

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Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]