Cagle World

Gee, what a surprise.

Eight Senate Democrats sold out their party, surrendered the 40-day fight, and forged a deal with MAGA Republicans to end the government shutdown in exchange for winning nothing in return. Is that totally in character or what? Dems stomping on their own grassroots momentum by going belly up is so Dems. Please excuse this Red Sox analogy: I haven’t seen a choke this bad since the easy grounder rolled through Bill Buckner’s legs.

There still may be an upside for timid Team Blue, but first I need to fume. Did the eight senators in the Cave Caucus (all of whom are insulated from voter wrath because they’re either retiring or not up for reelection in 2026) somehow fail to notice what happened earlier this month?

Democrats won landslide elections coast to coast, kicking Trump’s capacious rear thanks to a massive grassroots turnout, precisely because they were finally fighting back, because they were slamming the brakes on Trump’s authoritarian rule, because they were highlighting MAGA’s refusal to extend the federal subsidies for Obamacare. And they were winning the messaging war; by double-digit percentages in poll after poll, the public has blamed Trump and his Capitol Hill toadies for the shutdown – and supported the Democratic stance on affordable Obamacare.

After all the landslide wins, even Trump admitted he and his cult got clobbered because of the shutdown. Because they were forcing millions of needy people to go hungry. Because they were screwing with people who want to fly. Because, all told, they want to force-feed Americans to drink their Cruel-Aid.

Typically, a shutdown hurts the party that triggered it. Newt Gingrich and his congressional GOP lost the shutdown of 1995, where they failed to pressure President Bill Clinton into signing their conservative budget bill. Ted Cruz led a government shutdown in 2013, intent on sabotaging Obamacare, but he failed abysmally. The difference this time, a rarity indeed, was that the triggering party was winning in the court of public opinion.

So naturally, those eight Dems threw in the towel.

All they got in return was a Republican pinky promise to hold a (meaningless) vote in December on extending the Obamacare subsidies. Angus King, the Maine independent senator who caucuses with the Dems, went on TV today and uttered this white-flag classic: “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work.” Um, yes it did. Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist, said it best: “A shutdown that was bleeding the MAGA GOP dry will end because (those Dems) were suckers who make Neville Chamberlain look like Genghis Khan.”

What are the odds the Senate’s December vote on those Obamacare subsidies will result in a Democratic win? What are the odds a hefty share of MAGA Republicans will cross the aisle and keep coverage affordable?

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Cave Caucus, actually says this: “We’ve heard from a number of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle that they’re willing to come to the table, they’re willing to work with us once the government is open to get this done. We’ve heard the same thing from the White House. So now we’ll see if they’re really gonna work with us.”

Surely she’s not that naive. But she’s retiring, so why should she care?

OK, I’m done fuming. Hard as it may be to believe, there’s a potential political upside to this debacle.

When that December vote happens, Senate Republicans will refuse to extend the Obamacare subsidies, thereby screwing the 22 million Americans who face huge premium hikes this winter. And even if the Senate were somehow to vote in favor of compassion, rest assured Mike Johnson’s House MAGAts would stonewall it.

Therein lies the Democrats’ political opportunity: the fact that MAGAts in Washington don’t give the remotest flying you-know-what about affordable health care.

Democrats already own the health care affordability issue. If and when Trump’s legislative minions smack down the Obamacare subsidies – voting, in essence, to spike the cost of people’s coverage – Democrats can hammer that issue from now until the midterm elections. And it plays well everywhere, because it just so happens that Obamacare beneficiaries live disproportionately in red states.

Even the Trump camp knows MAGA congressional incumbents are vulnerable on that issue. Four months ago, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio surveyed the most competitive House districts and concluded: “Among those most motivated to vote – an early indicator of midterm turnout – the Republican is down 7 points. If the Republican candidate lets the premium tax credit (the Obamacare subsidies) expire, the Republican trails the Democrat by 15 points. There is broad bipartisan support for the tax credits and their extension.”

Armed with that kind of midterm ammo, will Democrats unfurl the flag of battle and storm the ramparts 24/7?

Don’t answer that.

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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]

Landslide Democratic victories…now there’s a phrase that I’d almost forgotten how to type. But it has leapt from my keyboarding fingers and landed on the screen with the full force of factual reality.

The message in a nutshell: Trump 2.0 sucks.

Granted, all the blue triumphs in Tuesday night’s “off-year” tallies happened in states where Democrats traditionally win or strongly compete. But what’s most significant were their size and sweep, as evidenced by these stunning highlights:

– Mikie Sherrill, New Jersey’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, was expected to win or lose by a point or two because she seems kinda dull and because Trump made inroads in the state last year. But pointwise, she won by a whopping 13. She racked up 1.8 million votes, half a million more than exiting Democratic governor Phil Murphy tallied in either of his two wins. In last year’s presidential election, Kamala Harris barely won the state, but Sherrill outperformed Harris in every single county and captured five counties that Trump won in 2024. Sherrill stressed “kitchen table” issues and ignored all the culture war stuff (pronouns, etc.) that tripped up the Dems last year. And Trump, in his stupidity, did himself no favors by canceling or freezing infrastructure projects that’d benefit New Jersey commuters.

– Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, also stressed the kitchen-table issues, “pragmatism over partisanship.” She won by 14 points – making her the first woman to lead the state since its founding in 1776. And her victory share (57 percent) was the biggest for any Democratic gubernatorial candidate since 1961. She was also aided by Trump’s destructive impulses. The northern Virginia suburbs are ground zero for federal workers – the same workers that Trump has been firing during the MAGA government shutdown. According to the statewide exit polls, 59 percent of Virginia voters said they’ve been affected by the MAGA government cuts; of those people, 69 percent voted for Spanberger.

– In California, roughly 65 percent of the voters said yes to Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the House district boundaries in a way that will help Democrats pick up five congressional seats in the 2026 midterm elections. This is boring stuff for a lot of casual observers, but the California ballot measure is a crucial counterpoint to Trump’s plan to redraw the maps elsewhere to create new MAGA seats and in other ways rig the 2026 results.

– In Pennsylvania, which was Trump turf last year, 61 percent of voters retained three state Supreme Court judges that favor abortion rights – thus cementing the Democrats’ 5-2 high bench majority. And in Maine, 64 percent of voters rejected a MAGA ballot measure that would’ve limited absentee voting, reduced the number of drop boxes…the usual stuff designed to combat non-existent voter fraud.

You’re probably asking “But what about Zohran Mamdani?” The corollary question may well be, “But won’t the election of a Muslim socialist mayor in New York City destroy whatever progress Dems have made nationally to conquer their 2024 PTSD?”

My answer: No, it won’t.

Granted, Trump and his gang will treat Mamdani as a MAGA chew toy and try to make him the face of the national Democratic party, but pragmatic centrists like Sherrill and Spanberger – along with other high-profile Democratic governors like Newsom, Josh Shapiro, J. B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear – will have more to say about the future of the blue party than New York City’s mayor. And as various past mayors (Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg, Bill Di Blasio), can surely attest, governance in that unique urban environment rarely if ever brands a national party.

So let the MAGAts rant about Mamdani. The key grassroots dynamic right now is hatred of Trump. He was on the ballot everywhere last night in all but name, to his detriment. His overall approval rating has dropped to as low as 37 percent, and a whopping 61 percent say he has made the economy worse. The “affordability” theme clicked for Mamdani just as it did for the winning women in Jersey and Virginia.

Another national survey shows many of the voters who tilted to Trump in 2024 now have buyer’s remorse, thanks to their subsequent lived experience. According to the latest Economist/YouGov stats, support for Trump’s handling of inflation has dropped 31 points since February, while support for his handling of “economy and jobs” has dropped 21 points. Most notably, support from young people (18 to 29) has dropped 30 points, and his approval rating among independents is…check this out…28 percent.

That’s the mood at the moment. If the blue party can build on what just happened – stressing kitchen-table issues across the board, winning with progressivism that can drive turnout in places like NYC, winning with centrist messaging in more moderate states and districts – it still may be possible to rescue this benighted nation, to save democracy before it’s snuffed.

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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]

Laughter is a precious commodity in these dark times, and I indulge myself whenever authoritarian elf Mike Johnson opens his mouth. I’m like that mirthful Mary Poppins character who sings, “I love to laugh, long and loud and clear.”

The hapless House Speaker is defending the Republican government shutdown – and the imminent result that millions of Americans will see their Obamacare premiums spike as much as 100 percent – by insisting that there’s no reason to panic because his party is on the verge of crafting better health care coverage.

“Republicans are the ones concerned about health care,” Johnson told reporters last week. “We have hundreds of ideas literally on the table… grabbing the best ideas that we’ve had for years, to put it on paper and make it work.”

If one definition of insanity is saying the same thing over and over and over, then this party should be listed as a synonym. And it parrots its cult leader, who promised earlier in the shutdown that “We have a negotiation going on right now…that could lead to some very good things” for “great health care.”

This guy’s con has been going on for so long – dating back 15 years, to the birth of Obamacare – that now even people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are freaking out.

Greene has been pleading for help, since many of the Obamacare beneficiaries live in her red Georgia district. In recent days she has tweeted that “my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE,’“ and that lots of her constituents (“wonderful families and hard-working people”) will be similarly screwed if the enhanced subsidies are allowed to soon expire.

But does her party have anything in the works to help those people, any alternative plan at all? As if. Greene’s words: “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this, or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!…Johnson said he’s got ideas and pages of policy ideas,” but he has “he refused to give one policy proposal to our GOP (members).”

Maybe the new definition of woke is a conservative Republican who has finally seen the light.

The current crisis is what happens when you’re mesmerized by a carnival barker. Trump has long voiced his intention to kill Obamacare and replace it with something purportedly better, but I’ve tracked his worthless assurances since forever.

First campaign, 2016: “We will immediately repeal and replace Obamacare – and nobody can do that like me.”

First campaign, 2016: Replacing Obamacare “is gonna be so easy…And we will do it very quickly.”

January 2017: “You’re going to be very proud of what we put forth having to do with health care…The final strokes…It will be repeal and replace. It will be various segments, you understand, but will most likely be on the same day or the same week, but probably the same day. Could be the same hour.”

July 2017: “We’re gonna get that done, and I think we’re gonna surprise a lot of people.”

May 2018: “Wait’ll you see the plan we have coming up – literally over the next four weeks.”

June 2018: “We have a plan coming out in a very short period of time.”

May 2019: “We’re gonna have fantastic health care, and the plan is coming out in the next four weeks.”

June 2019: “We already have the concept of a plan…We’ll be announcing that in about two months.”

July 2020: “We’re signing a plan within two weeks.”

August 2020: “We’re going to be doing a very inclusive plan. I’ll be signing it very soon…Might be Sunday. But it’s going to be very soon.”

November 2023: “(Obamacare) is not good health care. I’m seriously looking at alternatives.”

Health care reform has never been in the GOP’s DNA. The party’s shtick is helping the rich cut their taxes, not helping the common folk get affordable coverage – even though 57 percent of Obamacare enrollees reportedly live in red congressional districts and 59 percent of citizen Republicans nationwide say the subsidies should be extended.

Democrats on Capitol Hill clearly hope a red grassroots groundswell will compel their GOP counterparts to cave – to agree to extend the subsidies as the price for reopening the government – but right now it’s hard to imagine that members who’ve been groomed to lick Trump’s shoes will come to their senses and serve their constituents.

Matthew Dowd, former pollster for George W. Bush, has the most succinct take on where we are: “GOP holds the White House, House, and Senate; refuses to compromise; does Trump’s bidding; and doesn’t care about the damage to our country or people’s lives. End of story.”

But fear not, Trump will soon ride to the rescue on health care with an awesome plan, according to his top federal health official, Dr. Mehmet Oz. You may remember Oz. He was federally investigated for a fake weight-loss cure, he was outed as a fraud by the British Medical Journal, and he was assailed by 1,300 physicians who signed a letter calling him “a quack and a fake and a charlatan.”

So naturally Trump hired him. And he knows how to repay a favor. On TV the other day, he said this:

“I fully believe the president has a plan.”

It never ends. What else can we do but laugh? To laugh is to abide the unendurable. Cue the rest of that Mary Poppins stanza:

“I love to laugh, loud and long and clear /

I love to laugh, it’s getting worse every year.”

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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]

Is it too pretentious to launch this piece with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche? The German philosopher and cultural critic has been dead since 1900, but he’s totally in tune with the America of 2025:

“When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

I’ve been pondering that warning ever since Trump used an AI video to pilot a fighter plane and dump diarrhea on pro-democratic protestors. Permit me to update Nietzsche:

“If you choose to live in a sewer, the sewer will gift you its stink.”

How we devolved to the point where a president of the United States can basically crap on dissenting Americans is something future historians will study for eons (assuming they’re free to do so). The poop video is way down on the latest list of Trump perfidies – starting with the East Wing demolition, a metaphor that even the dumbest grad of Trump University should be able to muster – but we do need to pause on that video before it slips down the memory hole, because it’s such a sick symptom of what we’ve become, of how low we’ve sunk.

Trump is what happens when a seriously coarsened culture surrenders to its basest primal instincts. His hatreds and grievances, his lies and demagoguery, his lust for revenge, his assaults on fact and truth, his weaponized anger and incivility, his dirtbag language – all that, and much more, were deemed worthy or excusable by a voting plurality, sufficient for a second White House tenure. Which proves Nietzsche’s adage that “Man is the cruelest animal.”

Granted, Trump didn’t create our debased cultural climate, but he is clearly its chief beneficiary, its end product, its toxic exploiter and accelerant. The late Michael Gerson, a principled conservative commentator, got it right back in 2018, during the first MAGA tenure. Lamenting the nation’s slow and steady death of civility, Gerson said, “The gag reflex is gone.”

And the best way to trace the civility death arc is to flag the behavior of Gerson’s fellow conservatives, who saw themselves as the guardians of morality, holding back the coarsened hordes while claiming fealty to God. They were all in righteous high dudgeon 27 years ago when Bill Clinton had sex with an intern and sex talk swept the land. Back then, evangelical leader Gary Bauer said, “I walk around my home with the TV remote in my hand for fear that they (his children) will come in the room when a story about the president comes on.” And Christian Coalition director Randy Tate saddled his high horse: “We have to be a nation that expects the highest from our public officials.”

Contrast that last quote with Mike Johnson’s amoral obsequiousness. When the House Speaker was asked the other day about Trump’s poop video, he was not concerned in the least about whether pooping on people was vile, sinful, or in any way lower than what we should expect from our top official. Instead the pious poseur sniffed his hero’s sewer and found it fragrant: “The president uses social media to make his point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that.”

Trump had indeed made his point. In a country that no longer functions as a democracy, the only opinion that matters is his. By definition, those who challenge his opinion don’t count – they are to be marginalized and crapped upon. In this new America, it doesn’t matter a whit what the national polls say – in the latest one, his approval rating is a feeble 39 percent – because he has the power and the guns to do whatever he wants, and that starts with ensuring the 2026 midterm elections go his way.

That video is the quintessence of his contempt for dissent and free expression. Mussolini once said that “if you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices,” but his formula for fascism now seems quaint, because Trump is tearing out the feathers in clumps, not caring that millions have noticed.

Yes, we’ve noticed. But then what?

A new report authored by more than 340 former national security and intelligence officials – titled “Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline” – warns that “Absent organized resistance by institutions, civil society and the public, the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion.”

Organized public resistance – bigger and more frequent mass marches – will test the public’s resolve. Nietzsche famously said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Will he be proven right?

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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]

To the surprise of absolutely nobody – except perhaps the MAGA cultists who bought the nonsense about impending “antifa” “Marxist” “terrorist” violence – the patriots who marched on Saturday numbered in the multi millions and did so in peace, in red states as well as blue, in cities like Boise, Idaho as well as my own Philadelphia.

If this grassroots movement is to have any chance of foiling the fascists who are destroying democracy and the rule of law, it will need to galvanize the communities that helped elect the criminal regime. I was pleased to see multitudes on the streets, but I wonder how many of those people voted for Trump in 2024. I suspect the percentage was small. The next time, it needs to be sizable.

It was all well and good, at the rally that fronted Independence Hall, to applaud House members Jamie Ruskin and Madeleine Dean (both Democrats) and various labor union speakers (who favor Democrats), but their participation was de rigueur. A certain kind of speaker still needs to come forward, somewhere, some time soon, saying something like this:

“On this day we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution and recall the deep commitments that unite our country…

“There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom…

“Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen and defended by citizens and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities…

“Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny…

“In America’s ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character, on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience…

“Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before, ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever…

“Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time…

“Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth are bound to one another in the cause of freedom…We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul…

“When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, ‘It rang as if it meant something.’ In our time, it means something still…Liberty will come to those who love it.”

That was George W. Bush. At his second Inaugural, on Jan. 20, 2005.

I remember that address only because I was sitting in the fifth row below his podium in the teeth-chattering chill, praying that my pens wouldn’t freeze. His words came to mind during No Kings II because the sentiments therein are precisely what some prominent Republicans need to say if we are to reverse the decimation of the America we love.

Strange bedfellows are desperately needed. It’s not enough for anti-Trump voters to show up en masse and laugh at the witty placards and applaud speakers they always agree with. Hopefully, in aforementioned Boise, Idaho and other red enclaves, there were rally attendees who voted MAGA but have now recoiled from the horrors they put in motion. Perhaps their numbers would grow exponentially if Republicans like Bush stepped forward.

Michael Steele, a former national Republican chairman, writes: “We could really use Bush’s voice right now. He has a voice that would resonate with a lot more Americans than even he may believe. Imagine how much more powerful this movement of Americans would be with his voice added to it. I know he may not agree with everything being said, but I have faith that he still believes in the principles of democracy. Even a single sentence from him would matter.”

Sadly, he has walked away from public life. He’d rather paint than fuel the democratic movement. That’s his choice, but surely there must be Republicans who still believe in the democratic values that Bush voiced in that second Inaugural, who still love the America that nurtured them, who still hew to the principles of the Constitution they swore to uphold in elective office. Their continued silence puts sand in the movement’s gears; what the movement sorely needs is a bipartisan imprimatur.

At his Inaugural 20 years ago, Bush challenged his listeners: “Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?” If only we could answer in the affirmative.

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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 Trump ran into trouble during his first term, he reportedly cried out, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?!”

Alas, his favorite thug-fixer-lawyer had been dead since 1986 (having perished just six weeks after he was disbarred for fraud). Nobody in Trump’s embattled orbit was qualified to pick up the torch and run with Cohn’s credo, which, was quite simple: If they hit ya hard, hit ‘em back twice as hard.

Back in the day, Trump told the press, “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy.”

Now he has Cohn 2.0, courtesy of slavish supplicant Pam Bondi, who is systematically destroying the credibility of the Justice Department, converting it into a Trump defense firm, and spitting venom at anyone with the temerity to ask adversarial queries.

What we witnessed last week on Capitol Hill would likely live in infamy if not for the fact the news cycle churns so quickly, fueled seemingly each hour by new horrors, hurling whatever just happened onto the ash heap of amnesia.

But I can’t let it go, not just yet.

It’s important to remember why Bondi got the gig as America’s top legal eagle. Her loyalty pact with Trump, forged in scandal (naturally), was sealed way back in 2013. As Florida’s attorney general, Bondi was deciding whether to join a class action lawsuit, filed in New York, against phony Trump University, with dozens of bilked Florida suckers demanding justice.

That’s when the Donald J. Trump foundation, then a nonprofit charity, swung into action. It sent an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution to a political group with ties to Bondi, who herself solicited that donation. Shortly thereafter, she announced she would not join the class action suit. Trump denied trying to buy Bondi, and Bondi denied there was any quid quo pro, but denials like those have less value than a degree from Trump University.

Anyway, she showed up in front of a Senate oversight committee, seething in anger at the very idea that anyone in the legislative branch would dare exercise the constitutional right of oversight. Senators do that as part of their duty to check and balance the executive branch and report to the American people. But that means nothing to Bondi because Bondi basically behaves and auditions for an audience of One.

Take, for instance, her exchange with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who asked if the FBI found photos of President Trump with half-naked young women in Jeffrey Epstein’s possession.

Bondi tried the Roy Cohn treatment: “Senator, you sit here and you make salacious remarks, once again trying to slander President Trump, left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from Epstein’s closest confidants. I believe, I could be wrong, correct me, Reid Hoffman…Yet, you’re grilling me on President Trump, some photograph with Epstein? Come on.”

It’s a good thing she said “I could be wrong,” because there’s no evidence that anyone named Reid Hoffman or Reed Hoffman has ever donated anything to Whitehouse’s Senate campaigns. But she needed some kind of Cohnesque con, given the sensitivity of the Epstein scandal, given the fact that she has shut down release of the files, and given the fact that, as Florida attorney general from 2011 to 2019, she declined to prosecute Epstein after he got a slap-on-the-wrist sweetheart plea deal from the feds in 2007.

During the Senate hearing, she also did her Cohn thing during an exchange with Senator Richard Blumenthal: “I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service…You lied. How dare you. I’m a career prosecutor. Don’t you ever challenge my integrity.”

Blumenthal, a U.S. Marines reservist for six years, said on the stump in 2008 that he’d served “in Vietnam.” He acknowledged that falsehood and apologized for it…15 years ago. Apparently Blumenthal’s lie in 2008 carries more weight with Bondi than the 30,573 lies that her bone-spurs client uttered during his first term alone.

It’s no wonder 280 former Justice officials have signed a letter demanding Congress demand more oversight of Bondi, not less. The letter points out 5,000 public servants have exited the Justice Department since Bondi began her reign, taking steps that have already proved ‘“catastrophic for the nation.”

I’d love to believe Bondi’s mockery of Senate oversight will backfire. Terry Moran, the ex-ABC reporter, clearly harbors such a hope. On his Substack, he references “Normal people. Remember them? Well, we’re still out here, you and me and tens of millions more…Normal, decent people don’t want what Pam Bondi showed them…Americans haven’t changed that much, for all our desperate political disagreements. We are still a decent, middle-class, middle-temperament, middle-of-the-road nation.”

But if that’s true, why did Americans re-hire a convicted criminal and saddle us with the second coming of Roy Cohn? And even if the normal and the decent wake up in sufficient numbers to protest what has happened to this country, what evidence is there that the authoritarians in power will care?

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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]

Politicians have been lying since the dawn of our formerly vibrant democracy.

Random examples abound. John Adams and his pamphleteering surrogates said that Thomas Jefferson if elected would shut down all the churches. JFK tried to pump up his anti-Soviet credentials by inveighing against a Republican-created “missile gap” that in truth did not exist. Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

But nothing in our history can compete with the industrial-strength lies that emanate with fascistic discipline from the mouths of the cultists who’ve already degraded our public discourse to an unprecedented degree. Steve Bannon said a few years ago that the goal was “to flood the zone with s–,” to the point where the average Joe is clueless to discern what’s true. Now it’s part of our daily diet.

Exhibit A, at this very moment, is the mendacious MAGA mantra about the government shutdown. The new Big Lie goes like this: Democrats shut down the government because they “want to give free health care to illegal aliens.”

Trump went a step further, naturally, by reposting a fake AI appearance in which a fake Chuck Schumer made this fake statement: “If we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”

To paraphrase what the writer Mary McCarthy once said about writer-rival Lillian Hellman, every word MAGA utters is a lie, including and and the.

It requires five seconds of cognitive thought to realize how brazenly stupid the lie really is. What political party, except one bent on committing political suicide, would ever propose spending billions of taxpayers’ money on giving free health care to millions of undocumented immigrants – and shutting down the government (thus imperiling many federal services and federal workers’ jobs) in a bid to advance such a scheme?

Besides, it couldn’t happen anyway because it’s illegal – and the Democratic party alone still respects and hews to the rule of law. Undocumented people are expressly prohibited by law from signing up for federally-financed health insurance. They can’t get Medicaid. They can’t sign up for Obamacare coverage. They can’t sign up for Medicare. They can’t sign up for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And not a single syllable in the Democrats’ budget plan even hints that the millions of undocumented people should be granted eligibility for any federal health care.

Brazen lying that stokes hatred of immigrants – and ties Democrats to those immigrants – is diabolically brilliant. The MAGA cultists may not realize (because their knowledge of history is at best shaky) that they are veritable disciples of Vladimir Lenin, who said more than a century ago that political rhetoric should be “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion and contempt…of such a nature as to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent.”

Right now there’s also an ancillary Big Lie, as articulated by deputy despot Vance: “If you’re an American citizen and you’ve been to the hospital in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that wait times are especially large and very often somebody who’s there in the emergency room, waiting, is an illegal alien, very often it’s a person who can’t speak English. Why do those people get healthcare benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens? The answer is a decision made by the Biden administration.”

But in truth – for what that’s worth – Biden made no such decision. Under longstanding federal law, hospital ERs are required to help everybody in need, and a tiny portion of Medicaid spending – .4 percent in 2023 – picks up the ER tabs. That 1986 law was signed by a wacko deep-state commie named Ronald Reagan.

Why do the MAGA leaders lie so shamelessly? Because it works. Emotions trump facts; the gut trumps the brain. When the convicted felon lied a year ago that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio, his dearth of veracity was irrelevant. He’d tapped into the rampant anti-immigrant racism; empirical details didn’t matter. His crew is pulling the same con now.

Democrats have long been notoriously bad at refuting MAGA’s lies. In our post-truth dystopia, millions of Americans – the deluded and the credulous – have forfeited critical thinking and pledged allegiance to their own Jim Jones. Facts are strictly for the “libs”; what they crave is his anger. Unlike the stony-faced military brass, they swallow whatever he says, and they’re happy to drink his Cruel-Aid.

Which is worrisome, and compels me to quote Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

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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]

Lest we be tempted to applaud the Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s Friday decision to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air in cities like Seattle and St. Louis and Tulsa and Birmingham and Little Rock and Roanoke and Washington D.C. – thus lifting its blackout at 38 ABC affiliates – it behooves us to remember this company’s “news” operation is a font of right-wing disinformation in service to the MAGA mission.

I’ve been writing about Sinclair on and off since 2018, fascinated as I am with its confluence of capitalism and authoritarianism. Sometimes its MAGA messaging has all the subtlety of a military jackboot marching across one’s skull.  Sometimes – as we just saw the other day, on a story of serious national import – Sinclair simply lies by omission, secure in its quest to keep millions of Americans egregiously ill-informed.

On Thursday, Trump’s toadying Justice Department, acting at his specific behest, indicted James Comey, the ex-FBI director and longtime Trump foe, for allegedly making several false statements in a Senate hearing five years ago.

Sinclair has something it calls “The National Desk,” which writes stories for the websites of its 294 TV stations, and its Comey indictment story was classic Sinclair – not for what it said, but for all the relevant facts that were left unsaid.

That story featured two long quotes from Trump’s social media account and finished with a predictable comment from Trump’s press secretary. That was all.

But here’s the crucial factual material that somehow did not make the cut:

1. The story didn’t mention the original federal prosecutor – a Trump appointee – quit his job rather than push for an indictment on charges he believed were baseless or insufficient to indict.

2. The story didn’t mention his successor, an insurance attorney who has never prosecuted a single case, was appointed by Trump just days ago, and rushed the criminal charges in front of a grand jury despite fervent opposition from her subordinates, career professional prosecutors who believed the charges were baseless or insufficient to indict.

3. The story didn’t say this new prosecutor had been working in the White House staff secretary’s office when Trump plucked her for the big job.

4. The story didn’t mention she moved to indict Comey at Trump’s command despite the fact Trump had preemptively declared on social media Comey is “guilty as hell” – a prejudicial statement that Comey’s lawyers can cite as evidence their client can’t get a fair trial.

5. The story didn’t mention the indictment is itself unprecedented, that the norm ever since Watergate 50 years ago is the Justice Department operates independent of the White House, free from extreme presidential pressure.

Nor did the story say that even if Comey’s indictment is ultimately dismissed, the fact it even happened sends a message to others who dare to dissent, that they too could wind up on trial if they displease a “leader” who deems vengeance to be more important than evidence.

So that’s Sinclair at its most insidious. More often, it prefers the frontal assault.

Sinclair has a “National Desk” TV show that runs on a wide swath of Sinclair affiliates. In January 2024 it lost its lead anchor, Eugene Ramirez, who quit because he could no longer abide the stories he was required to put on the air. The stories, often inaccurate or tilted rightward without proper context, were typically culled from Republican and conservative group press releases. (Example: Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill would cost “$400 trillion.” That lie was off by $399 trillion.)

Ramirez was also admonished by corporate higher-ups for disputing dubious claims made by the show’s right-wing guests; Ramirez was ordered not to interrupt them.

Such episodes are too numerous to list. In 2017, Sinclair HQ ordered its local outlets to air thrice-weekly segments starring “political correspondent” Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-born Trump apparatchik who parrots MAGA. In 2018, people at HQ wrote Trump promotional pieces and ordered the local outlets’ anchors to read the pieces on the air “exactly as they are written” – prompting angry employees at one Sinclair station to warn, in an article posted on Vox, that “Sinclair management is turning up the heat on pro-Trump content and we, the journalists at this station are the frogs in the pot.”

As are we all.

And stripping stories of factual context – to wit, its coverage of the Comey indictment – dumbs down the citizenry and ups the ambient heat. Putting Kimmel back on the air was just a strategic concession; Sinclair plays the long game and remains staunchly on the march.

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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]

Bear with me as I flash back, albeit briefly, to 2009.

Ted Kennedy died that summer, an event that triggered a tsunami of online hatred. I wrote about the Kennedy fallout, lamenting how the internet had afforded idiots the opportunity to exhibit their worst selves. But it never occurred to me to demand that such people should be hunted down and fired from their jobs, or, more broadly, that free speech should be less free and that vile opinions should be censored. Nor would it have remotely occurred to the Obama administration to create and unleash Thought Police.

But today Trump and his minions are goose-stepping all over the First Amendment – Jimmy Kimmel was only the latest casualty (thankfully just temporarily) – and what amazes me is that anyone with a brain can be shocked that this is happening.

Fascists aren’t shy about their intentions. I blame the voters who were too oblivious, feckless, or stupid to see what was so blatantly obvious. So here we are, stuck with a crew of opportunists who are exploiting Charlie Kirk’s murder to suppress speech – in open defiance of our constitutional rights to rudely dissent, or satirize, or misspeak in ways that might piss some people off.

I’m old enough to remember when conservative Republicans feared federal government overreach. But now we have Trump’s toadies (with predictable Republican complicity) flexing unprecedented federal muscle to squeeze cowering corporations. Exhibit A is Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, who pressured Disney-ABC “to take action on Kimmel.” Earlier last week, on a right-wing podcast, Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” – which is like something you’d normally hear a crime thug say in a Guy Ritchie movie.

That’s ironic. Six years ago, FCC member Carr wrote on social media: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not.” Three years ago Carr wrote: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion.” Two years ago he wrote “censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” And one year ago he said “free speech is the check on government control.”

But now Carr wears the MAGA armband. Now he marches with Trump, who said the network news shows criticize him too much and “they’re not allowed to do that.”

Actually, according to the First Amendment, they are.

This is straight from the tyranny playbook – as practiced these days in places like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey. It doesn’t seem to matter the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark case 61 years ago, wrote unanimously that, under our Constitution, “every citizen may speak his mind…and may not be barred from speaking or publishing because those in control of government think that what is said or written is unwise, unfair, false, or malicious.”

One shudders to think what today’s MAGA-captive court might say about that unanimous ruling – although last year, in a case involving the NRA, it did rule that “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” So perhaps they’d agree with David French, a conservative attorney who has long defended the free speech rights of conservative speakers, who wrote: “The Constitution is most vital when times are most contentious. The First Amendment exists precisely because the founders knew there would be times when free speech would be deeply unpopular. This is one of those times.”

Even The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page writes that MAGA is flexing too much muscle. It says that “in a free society,” a comedian’s remarks “shouldn’t be cause for the government to push someone off the airwaves.” And it warns: “The political cycle of using government to punish opponents is taking the country into dark corners that will result in less freedom, and less free speech, for all sides.”

Dare we hope for the tide to turn, for the First Amendment to weather this crisis? Only if the sentiment voiced by The Journal is echoed far and wide. Only if fury triumphs over ennui.

Historian Peter Englund recently wrote a great book, November 1942, which focused, at ground level, on the average people who were caught up in the fascism of the 1940s:

“They were part of that great uninterested and unwilling mass – the silent despairing majority for which history is a remote and incomprehensible enigma which has done, is doing, and will continue to do another of its cruel twists and turns; and as if it were a force of nature, it has suddenly burst into everyday life and, whether directly or step by step, changed it or destroyed it, in spite of people’s hopes that it won’t really be that bad or that it will blow over or that it will mainly afflict others.”

Unless we speak our minds en masse, this metastasizing storm will afflict us all.

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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]

There’s an unwritten law in our doomscrolling dystopia that when something bad happens, everyone shall speedily post a clickable opinion, something that’s often little more than eye candy with empty calories. So imagine how remiss yours truly has been. I’m apparently the very last member of the far-flung commentariat to weigh in on the horrific public death of Charlie Kirk.

Call me crazy, but I felt it was wise to wait nearly 48 hours, to catch my breath and think about things in a microclimate of calm. I even boycotted social media, which in those 48 hours had predictably become a soul-sapping cesspool of lunacy.

I also reminded myself that, believe it or not, most Americans do not live there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of empathy, how it connects us with one another, and how its absence can imperil us. An old quote from Hannah Arendt, the late philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, has been rattling loose in my head: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

I also recall that Charlie Kirk made it abundantly clear that he had no use for empathy. In his words, “Empathy is a new-age term that’s done a lot of damage.”

Hence my personal challenge: Feeling empathy for a person – trying to understand him, trying to walk in his shoes – when that person feels no empathy for others.

No empathy, especially, for Black professionals (“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy I hope he’s qualified’.”). Or for Black women (“You do not have brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously, you have to go steal a white person’s slot”). Or for the victims of America’s gun violence epidemic, including schoolchildren (“I think it’s worth the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”). Or for single women (“the most depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely in America’s history…so they start to lash out at the rest of society”). Or for Jews (“Some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas… Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”). Or for gay people (who are “corrupting your children”).

OK, Kirk makes it hard for me.

But I can still put myself in his shoes. I invite you to do it as well, to sit on a stage in a spirit of open and civil debate (which he routinely did), and to perhaps feel, if only for a millisecond, the thud of a bullet canceling your consciousness forever. That is America at its primal worst, and I find it sickening that some find Kirk’s death grist for jokes and celebration.

The place to defeat someone like Kirk is in the public square. Perhaps Kirk’s most ghoulish critics should be asking themselves why he was so successful there, and what needs to be done to win over the impressionable young people who’ve dug his message.

Nobody deserves summary execution. Nobody’s kids deserve to be orphaned, and nobody’s wife deserves to be widowed. To feel otherwise, as Arendt wrote, is a symptom of encroaching barbarism. It would be nice, of course, if the other side felt the same way – I’m referring to the MAGA leaders who evinced no empathy in June when ex-Minnesota House Democratic Speaker and her husband were assassinated – but I see no value in responding in kind. I can’t police their souls, only my own.

David French, the sane conservative columnist, says, “We can’t let the worst voices define how we respond to this moment.” I suspect that most Americans agree. For the sake of civility, let’s take a breath and live our best selves.

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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]