Cagle World

If we still lived in a rational democracy, the masked thugs in Trump’s ill-trained paramilitary force would be in full retreat.

By wide margins in multiple polls (CNN, Quinnipiac, Economist/YouGov, Data for Progress), Americans say the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis was not justified, that ICE is making the cities less safe, and that it needs to be reined in or even abolished. The public backlash is so fervent, according to a new Associated Press poll, that Trump’s approval rating on immigration has cratered. Trump arguably won in 2024 on the perceived strength of his hardline immigration stance, but now the AP says that only 38 percent of Americans support the way he’s handling the issue. A landslide 61 percent give him thumbs down.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesliar, declared the other day that immigration “remains among his best polling issues,” but sane observers know better. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, says “the Renee Good story has broken through” – at Trump’s expense – “in a way other stories have not.” In focus groups, she talks to “ardent fans of the president,” some of whom now believe that his anti-immigrant aggressiveness has “gone too far.”

Perhaps you’ve heard about the Minneapolis couple that made the mistake last Wednesday of driving their SUV down the wrong street – “wrong” only because members of Trump’s Sturmabteilung were busy doing their thing. The presence of ICE had drawn protestors; ICE responded with flash-bang grenades and tear gas, ignoring or not noticing the trapped couple had their six kids in the SUV. It filled with smoke, and three of the kids required hospital treatment – including the youngest, six months old – because they could barely breathe.

Even hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan – one of Trump’s biggest ‘24 boosters, named by the Wall Street Journal as “the country’s most important swing voter” – is repulsed by MAGA’s boots on the ground. Renee Good’s death “just seems like all kinds of wrong to me,” he said in his studio the other day. “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people – many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

Gestapo…he said it, not me.

And of course that’s what we’ve come to – thanks to a voting plurality that chose to commit national suicide and usher in a goonocracy.

It’s nice that people en masse have woken up and remembered (perhaps too late) fear and terror are not core American values, and a case can even be made that Rogan’s epiphany is somewhat analogous to Walter Cronkite’s 1968 on-air announcement Lyndon Johnson was wrong to wage the Vietnam war. LBJ quickly realized when he lost Uncle Walter, he was politically doomed. Today, if this were a just world with at least a shred of democratic decency, Trump would heed Rogan and dial back the madness.

But here’s the big problem: Authoritarians don’t care what their peasants think.

I know it sounds melodramatic to say we’re living on a knife’s edge, but reality trumps the natural instinct to ignore and deny. Thanks to the lavish funds supplied by last summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the mass recruitment of ICE goons continues apace, and Trump seems to be thirsting for any excuse to send in the military to wage domestic war under the Orwellian guise of imposing peace, while lying with each inhalation of oxygen about Minneapolis and everything else.

So what can we the people do to salvage what we’ve always loved about this country, what we long took for granted? The only rational option is to push back peacefully in the street, demonstrating that indeed there can still be strength in numbers; to inspire the jelly-legged congressional Democrats to reattach their spines; and to vote massively for renewed checks and balances in the November midterms – braving the inevitable MAGA efforts to obstruct the vote counts and cry foul in the aftermath.

It’s been 10 years of havoc. On election night in 2016, my late wife stayed up til dawn tallying the returns, in the futile hope that Trump’s first win would not stand. That morning she told me, “This is not the country I thought I lived in.” She didn’t live to see his second win. Her father had fled fascism for America in the late 1930s, and to her it was an article of faith that we were the good guys. She would be aghast today, but her feet would be on the street – mindful, as the people of Minneapolis well know, that silence is surrender.

The Germans kept their heads down. We have three centuries of tradition to tap for rebellious inspiration. We owe it not only to ourselves, but to the everyday patriots who’ve passed on.

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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]

As I tally the growing list of artists who have scraped Donald Trump off their shoes by exiting the MAGA Kennedy Center – the latest refugees are Nashville banjoist Bela Fleck and the entire Washington National Opera – I can’t help but recall so many entertainers took the opposite tack when the Nazis goose-stepped into Paris early in World War II.

It may seem obvious to us artists should be among the first to condemn fascism by word or deed, and rest assured that those who’ve canceled on the Kennedy Center have no regrets. But it does take a certain amount of fortitude to forfeit income by taking a stand. And what these artists have done feels even more laudable when contrasted with what so many of their French counterparts did (or, more precisely, failed to do) during the Occupation.

Major players like singer Maurice Chevalier, playwright Jean Cocteau, and actor Sacha Guitry performed for and partied with the Nazis and and rationalized their behavior by insisting they were trying to boost citizens’ spirits. Serge Lifar, who headed the Opera ballet, stayed in his post for that ostensible reason. The collaborationist film actress known as Arletty, who had a wartime affair with a Nazi officer, went one step further: “My heart is French, but my ass is international!”

All the more reason we should applaud the Kennedy Center dropouts  – people like Alabama folk singer Kristy Lee (“When American history starts getting treated like something you can ban, erase, rename, or rebrand for somebody’s ego, I can’t stand on that stage and sleep at night”); like Doug Varone and Dancers (“With the latest act of Donald J. Trump renaming the Center after himself, we can no longer permit ourselves nor ask our audiences to step inside this once great institution”); and the Cookers jazz band (“Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice”).

Trump’s flunkies at the Center have predictably imploded. Rick Grenell, who’s now running the place, says the exiting artists have “derangement syndrome.” When Bela Fleck (43 Grammy nominations, 18 wins) pulled out the other day, canceling three scheduled shows, Grenell addressed him in a post on Elon Musk’s X: “You caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties. This mob pressuring you will never be happy until you only play for Democrats.”

Fleck responded in the press: “The reaction of Richard Grenell is exactly what I’m talking about. That’s what I don’t want to be a part of.”

Nor does Wayne Tucker, Brentano Quartet with Hsin-Yun Huang, Magpie, Maria João Pires, Marc-André Hamelin, comedy show Asian AF, the touring production of Hamilton, Chuck Redd, Stephen Schwartz, Issa Rae, Rhiannon Giddens, Balún, or mystery writer Louise Penny (who said that her Center book launch “was going to be a career highlight, but there are things far more important than that”). Nor does Shonda Rhimes, who resigned from the Center’s board of trustees, wish to be associated with the MAGAts. Nor do Ben Folds and Renée Fleming, who quit as artistic advisors.

None of these people want to be totalitarian play toys or window dressing for a fascistic vulgarian who’s slashing the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

In dire times like ours, the first duty of any artist is to take a stand through art. Michael Jochum, a drummer and percussionist who has toured and recorded with Jackson Browne (among others), is not a Kennedy Center refugee. But on social media he’s trying to buck up any wavering artists and perhaps even educate politically illiterate voters:

“What we are witnessing now is not simply a political disagreement. It is the normalization of moral collapse…It is exhausting. It is corrosive. And it is the inevitable psychological consequence of watching one’s nation be methodically hollowed out by men who have no relationship with truth, no respect for history, and no capacity for shame…History will record this moment with brutal clarity. Long after the slogans rot, what will remain is the simple accounting of who stood up, who stayed silent, and who actively helped drag the country into the mud. This is the test of our time. And far too many are failing it.”

One failed soul was Hendrik Hoefgen, a compliant German actor in the 1981 film “Mephisto, ” which takes place during World War II. Hoefgen’s character was based on a real actor who caved to the Nazis. What Hoefgen finally realizes, late in the film, is that every time he debases himself, his patrons thirst for more. He plaintively cried, “What do they want from me now?!”

They want it all, from all of us. That’s what fascists do. Kudos to the Kennedy Center rebels for saying no.

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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]

Leave it to MAGA Republicans to ring out the old year with one last blast of craven stupidity.

Mike Johnson’s House crew apparently assumed releasing Jack Smith’s recent secret testimony in the midst of holiday festivities would somehow ensure nobody would notice the ex-special counsel eviscerated his hapless inquisitors, leaving no doubt he had abundant ammo to paint Trump as a criminal in a federal court of law.

Trump and his House toadies tried everything to stack the deck against Smith. He wanted a public hearing, but was refused. Meanwhile, in the run up to his Dec. 17 closed-door appearance, Trump called him “deranged,” a “thug,” a “criminal,” and a “disgrace to humanity.” But Smith, a career adherent to evidentiary facts and the rule of law, was not deterred. Here he was, in the opening minutes of the hearing:

“Jan. 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy…Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

A House Republican staffer (whose name was redacted), pointing out Trump repeatedly claimed in the weeks prior to Jan. 6 the 2020 election was stolen, asked if you could prosecute someone for speaking his mind and if those statements are protected by the First Amendment.

“Absolutely not,” Smith said. “If (the statements) are made to target a lawful government function” – the peaceful transfer of power – “and they are made with knowing falsity, then no, they are not” protected by the First Amendment.

“When someone…commits an ‘affinity fraud’ – where you try to gain someone’s trust…  and then you rip them off – you defraud them,” Smith added. “And in a lot of ways this case was an affinity fraud. The president had people who had built up trust in him, including people in his own party, and he preyed on that,” by stoking followers to violently storm the Capitol, armed with lies about a stolen election.

The staffer tried several other tacks, including claiming Trump merely heeded what his close advisors told him. Smith flatly denied that was the case and had lined up numerous witnesses – all Republicans – who tried to tell Trump the 2020 results were legit. Trump reached out to many of them, including the top Republicans in swing state Arizona, only to be told what he didn’t want to hear.

“There was a pattern in our case where any time any information came in that would mean he could no longer be president, he would reject it,” Smith said. “And any theory, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law, that would indicate that he could, he latched on to that.”

Later in the day Smith piled it on: “The pattern and the depth of the pattern and the length of the pattern was pretty damning evidence that he knew (his stolen election claims) were false. He only brought ‘fraud’ claims in states in states that he lost. When he was told that a ‘fraud’ claim wasn’t true, he didn’t stop making it…claims that were so outlandish and so just fantastical, continuing to push those claims after they’d been disabused, was strong evidence (for) our case…False claims about dead voters. It would be false claims about underage voters. It would be false claims about illegal alien voters.”

At this point, the House Republican inquisitor was flailing. How come Smith was so “laser focused only on President Trump”? Wasn’t Smith part of a political conspiracy to hurt Trump’s 2024 candidacy, “keeping him off the campaign trail”?

“All of that is false,” Smith replied, saying he only cared about the evidence he’d amassed, not the campaign calendar. And particularly with respect to Jan. 6, “the evidence made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit…Our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it.”

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely wondering whether the effort was even worth it. Jack Smith’s case feels like ancient history, the rule of law has no more value than a clump of soiled tissue, and Generalissimo Bone Spurs is off the leash and plotting imperial conquest in the southern hemisphere.

But if you have read this far, you may well believe that it’s vitally important to do whatever we can, however modest those efforts might be, to document Trump’s criminality for the historical record, in the fervent hope that future Americans will be free to listen and learn.

Because, as Smith warned during his testimony, if there’s no accountability, even in the rear-view mirror, for what Trump did to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power, “it becomes the new norm.” That would be, in his word, “catastrophic.”

And that’s why I wrote this.

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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 intend here to discuss MAGA handmaiden Bari Weiss, the CBS News assassin, and to suggest ways we can combat corporate media corruption. But first I need to share a story from my rookie stint in journalism. You’ll see why.

In 1975, while covering the cops in New London, Connecticut, I got a tip the boys in blue had screwed up. The first paragraph of my subsequent piece gives you the gist: “Bank Street was left unguarded by city police early Monday when a break-in occurred at Roberts Electronic. Thieves escaped with an estimated $1600 in stereo equipment.” Turned out, the Bank Street patrolman was back at HQ, eating, when the 2:32 a.m. break-in occurred, and the late-responding patrol car had to come from an I-95 shopping mall that was miles away – and was further delayed because it had to pick up the eating patrolman.

I wrote: “Police would not comment today on this report.” But my editor OK’d the story because the police department’s decision not to comment was irrelevant. I had all the key info I needed from eyewitnesses, the store owner, and public police records.

But if Bari Weiss had been my editor, she would’ve spiked the story simply because the cops stayed silent about the lax patrol car and its detour to pick up the eating cop.

My point is a kid covering cops and a small-city editor had better news judgment than Bari Weiss – in part because the grandly dubbed “editor in chief” of CBS News has never spent a day in the field covering cops or anything else. And it’s precisely her dearth of actual experience that makes her the perfect MAGA instrument for sabotaging the work of real journalists – as evidenced by last week’s debacle at “60 Minutes.”

The solid coverage of Trump’s torture hellhole in El Salvador – a story that had been pre-screened five times, cleared by CBS’ lawyers, and vetted by the folks at Standards and Practices – was spiked by Weiss on the eve of its American broadcast just because the White House, Homeland Security, and the State Department had declined to comment.

As Sharyn Alfonsi, the story’s reporter, rightly pointed out in an internal email, “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill a story…If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the ‘60 Minutes’ broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”

Stenographer for the state… That’s precisely why Weiss got her gig. Even the dumbest alum of Trump University should be able to connect these dots: On July 2, Paramount (CBS’ parent firm) gave Trump $16 million to settle a bogus Trump lawsuit, thus greasing his FCC’s approval, on July 7, of Paramount’s $8-billion merger with Skydance Media. Skydance, which is run by the Trump-friendly Ellison family, proceeded to steer CBS News rightward.

Decision number one was to install pliable Weiss as editor in chief, after buying her digital platform (hilariously titled The Free Press) for $150 million. To quote Walter Cronkite’s nightly sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.”

Uncle Walter – who once said, “Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy” – must be spinning in his grave about the fate of the “Tiffany Network,” so nicknamed for its quality and prestige. But this is what happens when 77 million inattentive voters elect a vengeful autocrat who openly declared, long in advance, that he would wage war on the free press and crush the corporate media giants beneath his jackboot. He’s just mimicking what Hungarian “strongman” Viktor Orban has already done in Hungary. Virtually all the big Hungarian media outlets are now controlled by Orban’s pet moguls.

On these shores, CBS News is now Exhibit A.

What can we do about this?

We can start by ignoring most of corporate media, which is terrified that ticking off Trump will harm its bottom line. There’s no point in pining for the good old days of “60 Minutes,” because they’re gone.

Instead, support independent news sites that defy MAGA, that still believe in holding the powerful accountable – sites that are buttressing, practicing, and promoting good journalism from the ground up. Ex-ABC News reporter Terry Moran concedes the new media environment is sometimes “chaotic,” but “it cannot be denied that (it) is more democratic, more diverse, and less captured by corporate interests…The future is here.”

But the future is not free. Donate during the holidays. Spread some money to the sites (most of them non-profit) that are writing and fighting to keep us free – Pro Publica, States Newsroom (which has put reporters in all 50 capitals), the American Journalism Project, The Atlantic, The Associated Press, Vox (great explanatory journalism), Philadelphia’s Lensfest Institute, The Guardian, The Bulwark (founded by sane Republicans), plus a subscription or two on Substack…or perhaps National Public Radio (which has been stripped of federal funding), or Lawfare Media (which each week features legal experts on YouTube critiquing Trump’s anti-democratic abuses).

If your dollars are depleted, sign up for social media’s BlueSky, where users shared the Canadian broadcast of the “60 Minutes” story. That alone made me smile. The upside of our turbulent new info-climate is that virtually everything salient finds its way to the sunlight.

And maybe if the tide turns, we should launch a GoFundMe for Bari Weiss. A starting salary as a local cop reporter would be most appropriate, given her level of experience.

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Copyright 2025 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]

We all have our guilty pleasures – pigging out on potato chips, scrolling TikTok, binging old rom-coms – but for my money nothing beats sappy escapism, the kind that warms your comfort zone, that transports you far away from the here and now. Especially now.

Rob Reiner crafted a string of classics. In recent days, his quality sextet has been invoked like a mantra: “Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Princess Bride,” “Misery,” “A Few Good Men.”

Rarely has anyone mentioned “The American President,” his 1995 collaboration with wordy wordsmith Aaron Sorkin – and probably for good reason because it’s not worthy of inclusion in Rob’s canon. At best one might charitably say that it’s canon-adjacent.

But here’s where the guilty pleasure kicks in. If one is pining for a president who is not insane, who’s buoyed by earnestly hyper-competent aides, who doesn’t lie with each breath, who doesn’t nod off during meetings, and who’s not a malignantly narcissist, then Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas in his silky smooth mode) is definitely your man. He’s pushing a bill to curb climate change by cutting fossil fuel emissions! He wants to curb access to handguns! And he’s so psychologically secure that even after a female lobbyist scathingly insults him, he does not call her Piggy! Instead, within, like, five minutes, he asks her for a date.

Our fantasy POTUS is a widower, so, yes, he’s probably lonely and horny. But Sydney the lobbyist (Annette Bening) is supposed to be a career professional, so why would she bed down with the guy she’s lobbying? That felt like a core plot flaw in the more innocent era of 1995, but when viewed through our prism of 2025, amidst the stench of rampant Trump corruption, who cares? How pleasurable it is to travel 30 years back in time and treat that conflict of interest as something weighty. Whereas, if Trump were to shack up with a Russian hooker sent by his Kremlin master, it would just be another day in dystopia.

That’s because we’re numb. Call it a survival mechanism. By contrast, nobody in “The American President” is numb.

Do you remember (if possible) the country we grew up in, when the presidency inspired awe? Even the film’s manipulative musical score is awestruck. And Sydney the lobbyist is awestruck. She’s a veteran ass-kicker and former prosecutor, yet somehow, when she enters the White House grounds, she beams at her surroundings like a bedazzled third-grader fresh off the bus on a field trip.

She gushes to the security guard, “This is my first time at the White House! I’m trying to savor the Capra-esque quality!” And the guard helpfully says, “Frank Capra, great American director. It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Capra was big on pie-eyed idealism, and Reiner, with a massive wink-wink, is telling us early on that he’s gonna own it all. And does he ever. His film is seasoned with enough Capra-corn to melt even the numbest heart. If one is willing to go with the flow.

There’s a sweeping shot of the White House – with the East Wing intact. There’s a moment when POTUS gives roses to Sydney after plucking them from the Rose Garden – the old garden, before its lawn was paved with cement. There’s a subplot where aides are swaying congressmen to vote for POTUS’ reform agenda – with no worries that Capitol Hill is infested by a fascist-friendly cult. One cannot imagine that President Shepherd would append his name to the Kennedy Center in violation of federal law, or that he would pal around with a pedophile and refuse to fully release the perv’s files in violation of federal law.

Imagine a world where a widowed POTUS dates an unmarried age-appropriate consenting woman – and it becomes a “character issue” that costs him 17 points in the polls. Imagine a world where a POTUS says, “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns.” And imagine a world where nutcase conservatives are out of power, and their leader, played with evil intent by Richard Dreyfuss, is mocked by a POTUS as someone “who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight.”

Pile it on, Rob Reiner! I’m there for all of it! Morph Michael Douglas into Jimmy Stewart and show him fighting for the American Way, going after guns and getting the girl. Trust me, it’s the feel-good flick of the season, a guilty pleasure sweeter than a tin of gingerbread cookies. It’s ultimate Rob, who truly cared, who sought in reel and real life to celebrate what we could be at our best.

Three months ago Reiner said: “It’s really gotten to a very, very scary place in this country, and we’re going to have to figure out how to dig ourselves out of this…But we have got to keep speaking out. Everybody has to keep speaking out. We’ve been the longest living democracy ever, and we certainly haven’t done everything right. We’ve done a lot of things wrong, but we go in fits and starts to move in the right direction. There was a time a woman couldn’t vote. There was a time Black person couldn’t vote. There was a time a Black person couldn’t marry a white person. There was a time where people of the same sex couldn’t marry. We move forward. We move forward.”

Move over, Capra. I’m feeling verklempt.

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Copyright 2025 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]

You may have noticed the MAGA madman is still fixated on the 2020 election he decisively lost but inexplicably thinks he won.

In fact, we have a new trifecta. On Oct. 26 he lied that Joe Biden’s win was “the biggest SCANDAL in American history!” Last week he lied the 2020 election was “a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months, too, loud and clear.” And at his batty rally, he lied that he won Pennsylvania in 2020, even though every judge at the time said he lost it.

My task today is not to fact-check Trump. I’ll simply point out that last week marked the 25th anniversary of Al Gore’s gracious concession of the 2000 election – which didn’t end until mid-December, when the Republican-led Supreme Court shut down Florida’s recount and dragged George W. Bush across the finish line.

On Dec. 13, 2000, Gore addressed the cameras and said: “I accept the finality of this outcome.” Imagine that.

How distant that date now seems. Way back then, Foo Fighters was a hot band, “Meet the Parents” was a hot film, Bernie Madoff was considered a savvy money man, and the Bush-Gore race seemed so inconsequential voter turnout barely topped 50 percent. The contest didn’t get hot until the bitter aftermath, which raged for 35 days because the outcome hinged on Florida’s cliffhanger.

Gore came up short because the five Republican Supreme Court justices threw a wrench into the state-ordered recount and summarily awarded the election to Bush. By flexing federal muscle, they violated their conservative principles – most notably, their (purported) respect for states to run elections in according with state laws. But everyone knew what was really going on. Antonin Scalia had let it be known that he relished the chance to become chief justice under a Republican president, and Sandra Day O’Connor had let it be known that, upon her impending retirement, she wanted her replacement named by a Republican president.

Maybe Gore would’ve lost the recount. But when the high court stepped in and pulled the plug, he could’ve marinated in grievance. He had a legitimate reason to be pissed off, far more than Trump had in 2020. He could’ve embraced victimhood and whined about a rigged result. He could’ve yelled “Fraud!” He could’ve stoked anger among his followers and summoned them to storm the steps of the Supreme Court.

But no. Here’s part of what he said instead, 25 years ago:

“Moments ago I spoke with (Bush) and congratulated him on becoming president of the United States. I offered to meet as soon as possible so that we can start to heal the divisions of the campaign and the contest through which we’ve just passed… History gives us many examples of contests as hotly debated, as fiercely fought, with their own challenges to the popular will. And each time, both the victor and the vanquished have accepted the result peacefully and in a spirit of reconciliation. So let it be with us.”

That’s how the game is supposed to be played. In Gore’s words that night, “This is America.”

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson set the tone in the bitter election of 1800. They won the same number of electoral votes and threw the outcome into the House of Representatives. Adams lost the House tally, swallowed his pride, and oversaw the first peaceful transfer of power. He wrote to his rival: “This part of the Union is in a state of perfect tranquility, and I see nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”

Gore responded in the same spirit. By contrast, a quarter century later, we’re stuck with a loather of democracy who squats at the crossroads of narcissism and fascism. The latest word is that he’s pressuring his legal defense firm, formerly known as the Justice Department, to scrutinize some of the 2020 ballots, hunting anew for nonexistent fraud in the rear view mirror.

I mentioned earlier that damaged people like Trump can never admit weakness or failure. His refusal to concede 2020 is merely Exhibit A; what we’ve seen in recent weeks is a similar refusal to admit that his stewardship of the economy is failing, that his insistence on awarding himself an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” is even a bigger joke than his fake FIFA peace price. Sixty nine percent of Americans don’t buy his economy nonsense.

Perhaps this manifestation of his signature character flaw will sink him and splinter the MAGA coalition. Let’s mark the Gore concession anniversary by wishing him the worst.

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Copyright 2025 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]

Imagine your boss at work were to doze off in the middle of meetings, waking up just long enough to spew racist insults at an entire minority group (“garbage!”) before reconnecting with dreamland. Or was notorious for sliming women as “stupid” and “ugly” and “Piggy.” Well, that boss would be speedily kicked to the curb. (Although I doubt that anyone criminally convicted of 34 felonies would’ve been hired at all.)

But with respect to the most important job in America, a job currently held by someone so clueless about his own ill health he apparently has no idea why his docs keep ordering MRIs, it’s woefully tragic there are virtually no avenues for removal – except for impeachment (tried that twice, forget it), or, dare I bother to bring it up, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Ratified in 1967, the untested 25th says a vice president, working with a “majority of either the principle officers of the executive departments” – what we now call the Cabinet – “or of such body as Congress may by law provide,” can eject a president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

In theory, given Trump’s dire medical and mental maladies, key people in power should be willing to confront our national emergency. Just for starters, they should acknowledge the obvious evidence of what mental health experts call “behavioral disinhibition,” which, in layman’s terms is, saying out loud the most insane stuff that lives in one’s head. The most common symptoms are “loss of manners/decorum” and “impulsive, tactless, or vulgar behavior.” Such as calling for the execution of one’s critics, “punishable by DEATH.” (Recent.) Or smearing all Somali immigrants as “garbage.” (Aforementioned.) Or lauding the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis. (Autumn ‘24.)

He reminds me of Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s corpulent sidekick in “The Big Lebowski.” Whenever Trump goes haywire, he brings to mind Walter’s impromptu rants and batty braggadocio, to wit: “You want a toe?! I can get you a toe, believe me! There are ways, Dude! You don’t want to know about it, believe me! I’ll get you a toe by this afternoon – with nail polish!”

In the words of Joyce Strong, a registered nurse who has evaluated the limited public mental and medical evidence, “Until Trump releases full medical records, including his medication list, toxicology results and independent cognitive evaluation, the country is left guessing about the health and fitness of the one officeholder with the power to hide it. And that is unacceptable and dangerous.”

But, alas, there are two roadblocks to action:

(1) The 25th Amendment doesn’t define unable or inability, nor does it offer any guidance on how to assess a president’s medical or mental impairments. The language is so flexible as to be almost meaningless. The loopholes are so massive that you could drive a Hummer right through them.

(2) It’s the vice president’s job to lead a removal effort, but the current veep would be roasted alive by the MAGA base if he were to make such a move. Plus, Congress is packed with MAGA-subsumed wimps who long ago donated their spines to science. Plus, the current Cabinet is nothing more than a trash heap of broken toys.

The good news is the mainstream media (I’m an alum) has finally begun to bestir itself enough to track Trump’s deterioration. Maybe most Americans won’t care about that coverage, given their general antipathy to the media. But what’s clear at year’s end is that millions of voters are jonesing to hold Trump accountable in the 2026 midterms by turning the House blue.

I doubt there’s a landslide majority for removing Trump on the basis of his medical and mental infirmities, but a landslide majority – 62 percent in a recent national poll – believes he and his MAGA allies have screwed up the economy and done squat about inflation. Most notably, he’s crashing among independents (25 percent support). And the tone-deaf elitist stuff he’s been saying lately (“affordability is the greatest con job by Democrats” and affordability “doesn’t mean anything”) should be grist for blue party ads from now til next November.

How sweet it would be to wax optimistic! But then I remember his mentally addled babble on the 2024 trail, like when he was asked whether he’d prioritize legislation to make child care affordable, and he answered this way, verbatim: “It’s a very important issue but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care is, child care couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”

77 million voters were fine with that. Or paid no attention. Or simply didn’t care.

So until the midterm ballots are tallied, I’ll reserve judgment on whether we’ve reversed our mental decrepitude.

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Copyright 2025 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]

When Donald Trump launched his first regime in 2017, I warned  he would “get a lot of people killed.”

Since nobody seems to be keeping track, I’ll cite The Lancet, a top medical journal, which concluded in 2021 Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of Covid.” The journal said that roughly 40 percent of the 470,000 deaths on his watch could’ve been avoided had he respected science.

In translation, Trump bears some responsibility for the deaths of 180,000.

But hey, remember what Stalin reputedly said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

Yes, stats can numb the mind. So let’s talk instead about the tragedy of one – as evidenced by what happened the other day in Washington, where a 20-year-old National Guard woman forfeited her flesh and blood for Trump. She did not die for a noble cause larger than herself; she died for the smallest of men, for a mentally deteriorating narcissist who’s using Guard troops as pawns for purposes of performative spectacle.

Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia should not have been in Washington, period. But she was, thanks to Trump, and now she’s dead. Her blood is on his hands.

Something like this – a bad actor walking up and firing bullets – was bound to happen. National Guard commanders feared so, in a memo back on Aug. 28. When it became clear Trump was bent on deploying troops to cities he hated, starting with Washington, even though National Guard members were not trained in law enforcement and crime prevention, the commanders warned their presence on the streets would be “a target of opportunity” in a “heightened threat environment,“ exposing them to “criminals, violent extremists, issue-motivated groups and lone actors to advance their interests.”

In other words, sitting ducks.

When the city of Washington sued the Trump regime, seeking to remove the troops, it cited the commanders’ memo. But when the Justice Department’s MAGA lawyers saw the memo, they dismissed it as merely “speculative.” Presumably they think otherwise now, unless they’ve been cult-trained to believe that picking up street trash and taking selfies with tourists are missions worth the shedding of blood.

Juliet Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says: “The National Guard is stranded somewhere on the battlefield of partisan politics. They’re not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.” But, of course, “we” never asked them at all. And now we’ve learned, thanks to a Nov. 21 federal court ruling, that Trump’s order was illegal. I know you’re shocked.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded Trump had stolen congressional powers and violated other stuff, but I’ll let Cobb tell it: “At its core, Congress has given the District rights to govern itself. Those rights are infringed upon when defendants (the ruling MAGATs) approve, in excess of their statutory authority, the deployment of National Guard troops to the District.”

In addition, the District “suffers a distinct injury from the presence of out-of-state National Guard units,” because “the Constitution placed the District exclusively under Congress’s authority to prevent individual states from exerting any influence over the nation’s capital.”

But ever since Nov. 21, Sarah Beckstrom and her fellow troopers – including Andrew Wolfe, who’s currently clinging to life – continued to be “targets of opportunity” because Cobb’s ruling has been in limbo thanks to Trump’s appeal. If he’d bowed to the ruling and ordered the troops out, Beckstrom would be alive and Wolfe would be healthy.

Which brings me to a Saturday editorial in The New York Times. This paragraph was astounding: “No one, including the president, is responsible for this tragedy, except for its perpetrator. It should be possible to understand both that Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard has been outrageous and that the use did not cause this shooting.”

I won’t cancel my subscription, but I have to ask: Is it really so hard to connect Dot A to Dot B and thus conclude that Beckstrom is dead as a consequence of what The Times itself called Trump’s “outrageous” use of the troops?

Predictably, Trump’s response to the shootings has been even more outrageous – ordering more troops into the District, thus creating even more “targets of opportunity.” This guy, currently saddled with a 36 percent approval rating, confirms something that Groucho Marx once said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

To me, it’s demonstrably obvious Beckstrom was sacrificed to the optics of MAGA theater, that she’s a tragic casualty of a fake war ginned up by a classic sociopath – someone who’s callous and narcissistic in the extreme, someone devoid of empathy. Am I being too harsh? Check out the exchange Trump had with a reporter the other day.

Q: “Do you plan to attend Sarah’s funeral?”

A: “I haven’t thought about it…I haven’t given it any thought…I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”

I rest my case.

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Copyright 2025 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 suppose I oughta move on from the evil lummox’s latest misogynist excretion – given that “Quiet, Piggy!” has arguably been trumped by his demand for the execution of six dissident Democrats and given his betrayal of Ukraine at the behest of his Russian master.

But I feel compelled to hit the brakes and ponder the reasons why we’re stuck with such a pig.

In truth, it’s no mystery. He’s the end product of a misogynist culture that fetishizes male dominance, that promotes or excuses hostility toward women, that trumpets aggression as intrinsic to masculinity. In turn he gives permission to all the bros who see women as objects to conquer, granting license to all the pigs who flooded social media after the 2024 election with the slogan, “Your body, my choice.”

The vile incident on Air Force One, where Trump stonewalled a Bloomberg reporter’s question and called her “Piggy,” was the umpteenth time in decades he has demeaned women, dumping on their worth and judging them on the basis of their…um…aesthetics. But in two elections he has been generously rewarded, which in turn has given him license to further desecrate the once-hallowed presidency.

Long before he ran for office, he got so angry about a Philadelphia Inquirer story he phoned the female reporter and called her the C-word. He got so angry about a New York Times column he sent notes to the female columnist calling her a “dog” with “the face of a pig.”

During the 90s, in numerous gigs on Howard Stern’s show, he trashed Rosie O’Donnell, ridiculed ex-wife Marla Maples, sneered at Angelina Jolie’s face, and set up a rating system, appointed himself judge and jury (“anyone who’s flat-chested is very hard to be a 10”).

Even in the early stage of his 2016 Republican bid, when any newbie would normally proceed with caution, he was openly piggish – attacking rival candidate Carly Fiorina, mocking former Miss Universe pageant winner Alicia Machado, and since Megyn Kelly’s looks apparently passed muster, he targeted her womanly functions. And if you throw in the Access Hollywood recording, plus the several dozen women who surfaced to allege sexual misconduct, it was clear that the pig had serious issues with America’s majority gender, rendering him unfit for office.

But did that doom him in 2016? Nope. Clearly he had an intuitive understanding of pig culture. Male voters favored him by a wide percentage margin (52-41) and a plurality of white women voted for him, too (47-45). A post-election study found that women generally view sexism as the cultural norm, so therefore Trump was saying nothing they hadn’t heard or experienced before. As one female Trump voter told the New York Times, “What he said about women was disrespectful. But I don’t get offended like some people do. You get through the bad and you focus on the good.”

Thus emboldened – indeed, having been validated – Trump publicly plumbed his depths during his first term, assailing MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski for “bleeding badly from a face-lift” and when Stormy Daniels ratcheted up his legal woes, he denounced her as “Horseface.” And a Trump aide, duly inspired in 2018, skewered White House reporter April Ryan as “Miss Piggy.” But, again, male voters and white women didn’t care; even though Trump lost his ‘20 re-election, he still won those cohorts.

Not even a criminal conviction in 2023 (on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his alleged one-nighter with Stormy), and not even a pair of civil court convictions in 2023 and 2024 (awarding $88 million in damages to sexual assault victim E. Jean Carroll) moved the needle at the 2024 ballot box. He won men by 10 points and white women by four; apparently, since everyone already knows he’s a serial misogynist (and a rapist “in the common modern parlance,” said one of the judges), he should somehow get a pass. A convicted criminal running for president – certainly that was new news – but his trashy behavior was merely “old” news.

So when his next “Quiet, Piggy”-style episode comes and goes, bear in mind this pig didn’t come out of nowhere. He was nurtured in the national pig pen – a place where pervs like Jeffrey Epstein and his pals run amuck; a place where 60 percent of male managers say they’re uncomfortable on the job around women; a place where The New York Times’ in-house right-wing columnist hosts a podcast initially titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” And it’s a country where sexually frustrated dudes – known as incels, some of them violent – meet up online to pine for a pig utopia where ruling white men subjugate women.

Step back and behold the barnyard that brought forth Donald Trump. Orwell said it best, in the last line of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Given the depths of our national degradation, is there still a wee chance that we can dig ourselves free?

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Copyright 2025 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 time for the president to resign! In the words of one newspaper editorial board, the guy “should resign because his repeated, reckless deceits have dishonored his presidency beyond repair…He should resign because that is his best hope to preserve shards of sympathy and respect from the verdict of history, to which he has devoted so much self-absorbed worry. He should resign because that is the best hope for sorely needed national catharsis. He should resign because it is the honorable thing.”

So said my old paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in 1998, when it called on Bill Clinton to quit.

More than 100 newspapers wrote similar editorials that September. All because Clinton had canoodled with Monica Lewinsky.

I’m not minimizing Clinton’s behavior – it was wrong, tawdry, and exploitative – but if we honestly compare what he did to the serial crimes and immoralities committed by the evil lummox currently in power, Bill’s abuses look like jaywalking. Especially now, with Donald Trump in full panic mode, scrambling to squelch the truth about his intimate ties to his dead pedophile pal.

But it’s too late for a coverup. Jeffrey Epstein said in an email that Trump “knew all about the girls.” Epstein said in another email, referring to Trump, that one of his girls “spent hours at my house with him.” Epstein said in yet another email that Trump is “evil beyond belief” – which isn’t news, of course, but it’s quite the descriptive, coming from a serial sex trafficker.

Measured against Trump’s moral depravity and dearth of character, Clinton was Mother Teresa. And when you include his latest sick con – shattering the independence of the Justice Department, turning it into his personal defense firm, ordering his lackeys to target only Democrats in Epstein’s world – my big question for the mainstream media feels arguably more urgent:

Why aren’t the editorial writers demanding Trump’s resignation?

Granted, I’ll concede that media editorials have less weight than a kitten on cotton, that they likely sway a grand total of nobody. But in a time of national emergency, it betrays the core journalistic mission to fall silent.

But the reasons for the editorial silence are sadly obvious. The electorate is so polarized, and the Trump-MAGA movement has stoked so much animus toward the mainstream media, that calls for Trump’s resignation would be met with incandescent fury and denounced (without due consideration of the facts) as biased poison spewed by “enemies of the people.” And most newspapers, mindful of their fragile circulation numbers, don’t want to risk alienating any remaining readers.

Plus, too many Americans have become desensitized to scandal. Looking back 51 years, it’s hard to believe that Richard Nixon was compelled to quit, having lost the support of key congressional Republicans, just because of one “smoking gun” remark on a White House tape, his command the CIA should tell the FBI to stop investigating the Watergate break-in. Trump does worse than that by noon on any given day. The public’s general reaction is benumbed exhaustion. Can an outraged editorial hope to engage those people?

On a New Yorker podcast the other day, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff (who exposed Clinton-Lewinsky) said it well: “Political scandals are almost passe now. Trump has broken all the rules of American politics, of norms, of behavior…We’re a totally divided country, so polarized, that convincing the other half that something is legitimately a scandal, about the people they support, is almost impossible.”

I still think editorial writers are abdicating their responsibility, but there’s no point in pining for a bygone era. Fortunately, there is still enough robust reporting on the Epstein story to sate those of us who are not benumbed. And now we have Trump pulling a 180, suddenly claiming that he supports full release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files – because it’s clear that House Republicans are jumping on board the transparency bandwagon, and the last thing Trump wants, later this week, are headlines that describe the House vote as a major defeat for him. So he’s scrambling/panicking to pretend he’s leading the parade.

But, to quote one report, “The bomb is ticking. And all he can do is await the detonation, just like everybody else. The President of the United States has lost control of events. He has lost control of the clock. The day of reckoning has arrived, despite all the best efforts of the White House spin machine.”

Oops, I wrote that.

About Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.

One day before The Philadelphia Inquirer called for his resignation.

Ah, the quaint good ole days.

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Copyright 2025 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]