Cagle World

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]

Years from now, assuming this sick country somehow manages to rediscover respect for science and truth, historians will marvel that a serial-lying convicted criminal and a serial-lying bargain basement Kennedy forged a moronic marriage that endangered the health and lives of millions.

How tragic it is for America that Robert Kennedy finished life on a hotel kitchen floor, but his son wound up imperiling lives in a Cabinet post. I won’t bother to count all the ways that Trump’s “health” secretary is raping science, laying waste to our once-proud public health system and behaving like a crackpot from the Middle Ages. Suffice it to say last week, it was all on detestable display in front of a Senate committee.

I long ago exhausted my ability to listen at length to MAGA liars, but this particular hearing was fascinating – much the way one is compelled to rubber-neck on the highway at a multi-car collision. This Senate showdown was inevitable, I suppose, because back in January when Kennedy’s name was up for confirmation, he assured everyone that he’d “do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking” vaccines – only to do the opposite in office, packing his panels with anti-vax whackos, canceling vaccine development contracts, and severely curbing access to the Covid vaccines that have been readied for autumn. In many states, new barriers have already been erected.

At yesterday’s hearing, even a few Senate Republicans managed to rouse themselves to a state of semi-awareness. The pitiable Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who’d cast the key confirmation vote based on his naive belief Kennedy wouldn’t screw with Americans’ access to the demonstrably safe Covid vaccines, actually uttered these words out loud: “We’re denying people vaccines!”

To which Kennedy lied, “You’re wrong!”

How typical. Have you ever tried to talk facts with a medieval MAGAt? They just double down.

The same thing happened to Senator Maggie Hassan when she pointed out that, thanks to the Covid vaccines, “there’s been much less serious disease. People do not have the same level of risk from Covid that they used to, because of these vaccines. People who want to exercise their freedom (to get vaccines) are being denied that because you are rejecting science.”

Kennedy’s response: “You are making things up to scare people and it’s a lie!”

Worse yet, it’s impossible to talk data with someone wearing a tinfoil hat. Kennedy actually declared, in an exchange with Senator Mark Warner, that he didn’t know how many Americans had died of Covid during the pandemic (1.2 million, a number that’s readily available), and that he didn’t know how many lives the Covid vaccine had saved (at least 14 million, according to hundreds of studies).

Warner’s comeback: “You are sitting as secretary of health and human services. How can you be that ignorant?”

I guess Trump was wrong during the 2024 presidential campaign, when he decreed that his ally Bobby Jr. is “respected by everybody.”

Of course, it should’ve been obvious during the campaign Kennedy was a dangerous fanatic – with his serial lies that 5G mobile networks were plotting to ferret out America’s anti-vaxxers; that anti-vaxxers were being hunted the way Anne Frank was; that Anthony Fauci was a “fascist”; that vaccines cause autism; and many more that will not foul this paragraph.

Kennedy reminds me of “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber,” a Steve Martin character on the original Saturday Night Live. After prescribing quack remedies to suffering patients, he had a momentary epiphany: “Wait a minute! Perhaps I’ve been wrong to follow the medical traditions and superstitions of past centuries! Maybe we should test our assumptions analytically, through experimentation and the scientific method! Perhaps I can lead us to a new age, an age of rebirth, of renaissance! (Long pause.) NAH!”

But seriously, folks. Let’s repurpose Mark Warner’s question: How can the American electorate be so ignorant?

A plurality voted for ignorance, so now it’s endemic. The best we can hope for, barring some miracle, is that family doctors and pharmacies and blue state governors concoct work-arounds so that Americans who want vaccines can exercise their freedom to be healthy.

It’s bad enough that Kennedy has disgraced his family’s legacy. How worse it would be if he drags the rest of us down with him.

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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 axiomatic by this point that the Grand Old Party has morphed into a pro-death cult ruled by the cruelest overlords in American history – as evidenced by their worshipful gun fetish, their determination to sabotage life-saving vaccines, and their crusade to destroy the federal agency that helps people recover from climate-change disasters.

The latter in particular has been on my mind as we mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,400 and devastated not just New Orleans but a big swath of southern Mississippi. You’d think after what happened – after the Bush administration was publicly exposed for screwing up FEMA, for staffing it at the top with inexperienced imbeciles, for slashing its budget – that the crucial agency would forevermore be gifted all the resources and expertise it needs to prepare and respond.

But that would only happen in a rational nation. The one we no longer inhabit.

The easiest prediction, in the fall of 2024, was that if a fatal share of feckless, oblivious, and ignorant Americans voted to re-hire a convicted criminal who vowed to wreak lawless havoc, then once in office he would indeed wreak lawless havoc. It didn’t take a seer to divine that one, or to predict what’s to come.

When the next catastrophe inevitably hits, a lot of people will die needlessly thanks to the pro-death MAGA cult – whose leaders have slashed one-third of FEMA’s work force at precisely the time when climate change is stoking the severity of killer storms.

How sickeningly on-brand it was, the other day, that after 200 FEMA employees signed an open letter warning us that the MAGA regime is plotting “the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people,” that the regime would respond by pulling a few dozen of the whistle-blowers off their posts.

And how sickeningly on-brand it was that some of those whistle-blowers got the word about their “administrative leave” while they were working down in Texas, helping the region recover from the recent killer floods. It was bad enough, 20 years ago, when the Bush regime weakened FEMA; now Trump aspires to finish the job.

L. Russel Honoré, a now-retired Army general who led a military rescue task force during Katrina, is sounding the alarm: “Federal assistance and coordination is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. This will become more apparent as global warming continues to heat the Gulf, making tropical storms more powerful, more frequent and hitting closer to home.” But now, thanks to Trump, “much of (FEMA’s) institutional knowledge has been lost and our best practices for disaster response destroyed.”

There’s an old saying that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes. I’ll pair that with an axiom of my own: Republicans Never Learn.

The political fallout from Katrina was devastating for Bush. He went on TV after the storm hit and said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the (New Orleans) levees.” But not long after, we learned (via video footage leaked to the Associated Press) that Bush had been explicitly warned in advance the storm could breach the levees; that during those briefings he didn’t ask a single question; and that he’d assured state officials, “We are fully prepared.”

But FEMA was not “fully prepared,” because the Bush team had been busy slashing the agency’s budget – killing FEMA’s disaster-planning program, its national flood-prevention program, and staffing the agency at the top with dopes who had zero experience in emergency management. Exhibit A, of course, was Michael Brown, who headed Bush’s FEMA based on his 11-year tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association.

15 months before Katrina the warning signs were already obvious. That’s when a veteran FEMA official told Congress that because of the Bush crew, “FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where…employee morale has fallen and our nation’s emergency management capability is being eroded.”

Any of that sound familiar?

In addition to slashing the FEMA work force, Trump’s cultists are defying the law (no surpriser there). According to the reform act passed by Congress after Katrina, top FEMA administrators must have a “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management.” But Trump’s current acting FEMA head, David Richardson, has no experience in emergency management – as evidenced in June, when he told FEMA employees that he didn’t know the United States had a hurricane season. (You read that right.)

The reform act also barred FEMA’s overseer, the Homeland Security Department, from meddling with FEMA’s “authorities, responsibilities, and functions.” But Trump toady Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, has been meddling anyway, big time, by delaying FEMA contracts and slowing FEMA’s response to the aforementioned Texas floods. Meanwhile, the Trump team swiped some of FEMA’s money and used it to build “Alligator Alcatraz.” The team also commanded FEMA to scrub, from its documents, various mentions of climate change.

All told, I shudder to think what will happen when the next inevitable catastrophe – driven by warmer ocean water, courtesy of climate change – decimates a wide swath of the homeland. General Honoré writes plaintively: “Twenty years after Katrina, we need a return to common sense.” But that would require an electorate that hasn’t lost its mind.

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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’ll spare you the line about how Democrats always bring knives to a gunfight.  It’s just sweet that – finally! – there’s a prominent Democrat who has the cojones and social media smarts to kick Trump’s sorry bum 24/7.

I grant you Gavin Newsom seems at times to be too slick by half, and one can certainly contend his six years as California governor have not been maximally stellar – lots of homelessness, struggling public schools, a housing shortage, lots of budgetary red ink. And many grassroots Democrats, in their usual pursuit of (nonexistent) perfection, are no doubt tempted to dismiss him as too “ambitious.” But unlike vocal MAGA critics Chris Murphy and Cory Booker, who are powerless in the Senate to actually do anything, Newsom has actual clout. He’s got muscle to buttress his mouth.

Trump’s poll numbers are already in the toilet – Pew pegs his current approval rating at 38 percent – so naturally his fallback plan is to rig the 2026 midterms in order to thwart a House Democratic takeover. It violates traditional American norms to redraw congressional seat boundaries in mid-decade, but the core tenet of Totalitarianism 101 is to seize and hold power by any means necessary, so thank God there’s someone like Newsom who’s willing to retaliate. He and his super-majority Democratic legislators are poised to neutralize Trump’s power grab via Texas by knocking out Republican House seats in California.

And Newsom’s online theatre – his relentless mimicking of Trump’s posts, exposing Der Leader’s pathological narcissism – has been strategically brilliant.

Finally we have a Democrat who’s fighting back at the tip of the spear, a Democrat who understands how important it is to dominate the social media space. His broader point: “(Trump) can’t win by playing by traditional sets of rules. He plays by no rules. I remind you all the time, it’s not the Rule of Law, it’s the Rule of Don – and we’re standing up to that,” by responding in kind.

MAGA is a five-alarm fire that can’t be extinguished with squirt guns. Michelle Obama’s credo – “When they go low, we go high” – is as obsolete as the videocassette. It’s tragically sad Trump has obliterated our norms and debased so much of what we held dear, but what Newsom is saying is the time for wringing our hands is long past. The only option we have left, and it won’t be pretty, is to win.

Will Stancil, a policy researcher and attorney, clearly gets it. On a recent podcast, he explained: “Liberals tend to be people who got where they are by following the rules and doing a good job and thinking things through and being detail-oriented. And they’re just temperamentally averse to an approach to politics in which you are winging it a lot and you are throwing things at the wall and you are being energetic and aggressive…That temperamental gap creates (a) rhetorical gap. And what we’re seeing now with Newsom is that he has closed a lot of that, to significant success.”

Granted, I know that mockery and retaliatory tactics aren’t enough to rescue democracy from the encroaching darkness. And I know, long term, the blue party can’t woo back disaffected voters without a resonant message; it’s not enough to say that Trump is horrible. But the journey back from the dead begins with bold marching steps, and Democrats could do worse than heed the leader of the world’s fourth largest economy, someone who at least understands that pugilism is better than pining for civility.

I also know that Newsom is not universally loved in his own state – a friend of mine, Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Z. Barabak, calls him “a grasping and nakedly calculating politician” – but is there anyone in high elective office who isn’t calculating? Some observers dismiss Newsom as an “imperfect” vehicle. You won’t find perfection in politics, not in this life.

Winston Churchill, until the moment he was named prime minister, was widely dismissed as a failed politician of bottomless ambition – but he galvanized the public by standing up to the Nazis. And, no, I’m not conflating Newsom with Churchill. I’m saying that people who yearn for anti-fascist leadership will forgive or ignore all kinds of flaws.

For now, it’s simply sufficient that Gavin Newsom has updated Michelle Obama:

When they go low, we kick them in the crotch.

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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 comes as no surprise America’s mutation of Neville Chamberlain raped our national honor during his meetup in Alaska with his Russian master, sucking up so shamelessly that any second I expected him to drop to the carpet and lick the mass murderer’s shoes.

Trump’s been doing this since forever. What’s just as detestable is formerly tough-on-Russia Republicans have mutely indulged his perfidies, and that oblivious Americans have rewarded him with ever-higher vote totals in three straight elections.

I hate to write this. I’ve spent the summer boating, biking, and hiking, and the last thing I want to do is stew anew about the Putin appeaser, the consummate fraud, the poster child for weakness. But “we are at a perilous moment without equal in the history of this nation, and Trump is demonstrably incapable of confronting it.”

There I go, quoting myself.

I wrote that seven summers ago, when Trump was preparing to meet Putin at a summit in Helsinki. And when they met, Trump told the world that Putin had more credibility than America’s intelligence agencies. In the end, “Helsinki proved that when the stakes are highest, when the nation’s security is threatened by a seasoned enemy standing a few feet away, Trump cannot bring the requisite A-game. And the Republicans who revered Ronald Reagan as The Great Communicator, as the stalwart foe of an ‘evil empire,’ are saddled with a president who verbally waffles in defense of his country.”

Just as Hillary Clinton did during the final campaign debate nine years ago when she stated that Putin “would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”

What the puppet did in Alaska – rolling out the red carpet, clapping like a cheerleader with pom poms, surrendering to the war criminal’s stance on Ukraine – was merely consistent with his long-established misbehavior. Like in 2016, when he publicly pleaded for Putin to hack Hillarys’ emails (“Russia, if you’re listening…”). Like in 2018, when he trashed the federal indictments of 12 Russian intelligence agents who’d meddled with our 2016 election on his behalf (he called the indictments a “rigged witch hunt”). Like in 2022, when he praised Putin for invading Ukraine (“This is genius…He’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper”). Like when he lauded Putin’s “great charm” and boasted how much Putin “liked me.”

We may never know whether Putin is blackmailing his pathetic supplicant or whether he’s just masterfully exploiting Trump’s grand canyon of neediness. Whether Trump is obliged to bow down because his businesses survived for years on Russian money (son Eric in 2014: “We have all the funding we need out of Russia”) or whether this is just Trump’s penis envy for Putin’s authoritarian prowess. All we can do, here on the receiving end, is glumly track the boundless damage he continues to inflict on our global reputation.

We’re collateral casualties of his mission to reward Putin for the original sin of waging war on an independent nation.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. Trump’s fealty to the enemy has been advertised in plain sight for a decade – and yet, as I mentioned earlier, his vote tally has steadily risen. As Casey Stengel used to say, “You can look it up.”

It’d be nice if Democrats could manage to craft a relentless 24/7 message about his soft-on-Russia weakness and the MAGA GOP’s appeasement. But somehow that’s too heavy a lift for the perpetually supine blue team. Suffice it to say that if the situation was reversed – if, say, Barack Obama had ever clapped like a trained seal after luring the murderer to American soil – Republicans would already be screaming about treason and citing Article III of the Constitution, which in part defines “Treason against the United States” as “adhering to (our) Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

And Republicans would’ve been 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]

When I heard the news the authoritarian imbecile had fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics director for the crime of factual math, I dimly recalled something that George Orwell had written in a magazine essay 86 years ago. I had to look it up to confirm my memory, but there it was:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

Orwell wrote that at a time when fascism and communism were riding high in Germany and the Soviet Union, a time when it was beyond impossible to imagine that such darkness could ever envelop the United States of America. Yet here we are, with 77 million voters having chosen a tyrant to tear us asunder from within, to the point where two plus two equals five because duh Leader can’t abide numbers that measure reality.

Remember, pre-election when he was convicted in a civil trial of massive business fraud because he fed fake numbers about his net worth to banks and insurers? And because, among his many cons, he insisted that his Manhattan apartment was 30,000 square feet, when in truth it was less than 11,000?

And remember, pre-election, when he was booked for alleged crimes in Georgia and, in lieu of being weighed as required, he insisted he was six-foot-three and 215 pounds? That was quite a stretch, coming from a guy whose bloat brings to mind Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca.

It’s a straight line from that weight farce to the firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer for reporting weak job growth. It’s a straight line from her firing to Trump’s math-flunking claim that “we’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1,500 percent” – which is nuts by definition, because it would mean that drug companies are paying us for using their drugs.

As we know, the purge of Dr. McEntarfer – who was confirmed as BLS director by 90 percent of the U.S. Senate, including then-lawmaker J.D. Vance – is merely the latest manifestation of Trump’s multi-front war on all forms of nonpartisan independent inquiry. His regime has even nixed a federal grant to study “The Spread of Unsubstantiated Information,” which was grotesquely predictable.

Day by day, the predator is raping empiricism itself. He told us all along that it would come to this. Those of us who spent years warning about the obvious are dumfounded so many voters remained so oblivious. Now we’ve got the country we deserved.

Without nonpartisan economic numbers, employers and investors are left in the dark, and, more broadly, the rest of us can’t really know what’s going on. But that’s all by design. Priority One in a totalitarian state is to repress knowledge and render the populace clueless. Any numbers that flatter the tyrant are OK; any numbers that make him “look bad” are borderline treasonous. It’s like what happened in the 1930s when Stalin announced a Five-Year Plan, but later purged his statistical director for “bourgeois pessimism,” for reporting low crop yields that made Stalin look bad.

Is there any reason to hope a pivotal share of Americans will wake up to what’s happening in time to salvage some semblance of a society grounded in factual reality? Is there any reason to hope that Trump will pay a steep political price for trying to render us clueless and stupid? I’ve seen polls that show him underwater on virtually every policy front (most notably the economy, thanks to his inflationary tariffs). I’ve heard that House Republicans back home for the August break are getting booed in town hall meetings for toadying to the tyrant – even in red Nebraska. But the road to a patriotic restoration will be long and arduous; failure will leave us with what Orwell prophesied in his dystopian novel, about math and the bending of minds:

“In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it…The very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy…For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

What then indeed.

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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]

Raise your hand if you’re shocked that Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein’s flop-sweating wingman, has been trying to blame his metastasizing scandal on Barack Obama.

No? Me neither.

When Trump opened his pie hole the other day and babbled that Obama had written the feds’ Epstein files and should be jailed for supposedly trying to “rig” the 2016 election, those of us with long memories nodded knowingly because the cornered rat is so predictable. Worse yet is Trump’s panicked desperation, as evidenced by his reposting of an AI-edited video showing Obama in handcuffs.

His Obama obsession is now in its 14th year, dating back to his racist lie that the president was foreign-born and therefore not a real American. By now it’s easy to forget how often Trump frothed about Obama during the former’s first term, like when he lied that Obama had created the policy of separating migrant families at the border, lied about Obama landing a shady book deal with Penguin Random House, and lied about Obama ruining the White House air conditioning. Just to name a few.

A clinical psychologist nailed it quite well six years ago for Psychology Today: “In Obama, Trump sees his antithesis – everything he is not and cannot be…Obama is a man in full, self-made, self-aware, self-contained, at peace with himself, at ease in the world. He traffics in inspiration,” whereas Trump “is constantly aggrieved, embittered, anmd at war with the world. Trump traffics in debasement.” Indeed, “so long as Obama exists, Trump is threatened,” because someone with Trump’s pathology “labors most to destroy that which is most threatening.”

And Obama is a person of color. That’s the key component. What Trump truly cannot abide is that a Black guy of high intellect who rose on his merit is demonstrably more popular than he is. For a white supremacist, nothing could be as galling.

A Gallup poll five months ago named Obama as “the most admired living president,” with a double digit lead over Trump. Worldwide, it’s the same story. Ever since Obama left office, roughly 75 percent of citizens polled in 24 countries have viewed him as the kind of president who would “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” The pollsters at Pew, in a global survey earlier this year, found that only 34 percent had that kind of confidence in Trump.

The big question – in the wake of the Epstein scandal, with clear evidence of a Trump coverup (he has known since May that his name was in the files that he’d earlier vowed to release) – is whether his Obama obsession still plays well with the cultists.

Right on cue, various MAGA meatheads have been trying to make it so. Senator Markwayne Mullin said on CNN the other day Obama gave Epstein a slap on the wrist, but the sweetheart plea deal happened in 2008, during the Bush administration. The deal was approved by a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney, the same guy who, nine years later, was rewarded by Trump with a Cabinet post.

Other toadies have been more ambitious. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas told Fox Business that Obama “lied to us about Covid,” a statement that flunks the math test, because Obama was three years out of office when Covid hit. But the award for Orwellian misdirection goes to smash-mouth radio host Mark Levin, who tweeted: “The Democrats are using Epstein to distract from Obama.”

I would like to believe at least some of the cultists will cough up this snake oil. Trump won last year in part because he’d promised his naifs that he’d blow the lid off the Epstein case and expose a deep state/Dem pedophile conspiracy. He whipped up their paranoia and conditioned them to expect a payoff. Now he’s staging a cover up and betting that he can skate by with fresh nonsense.

Who knows, maybe he’ll make it work. America has been reduced to a fascist and a complicit political party covering for a pedophile.

But the upside, for Obama, is that Trump has the attention span of a fruit fly and may have already shifted his blame game. On Monday he lied that the Epstein files “were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the auto pen.”

The auto pen did it!

Which prompts me to wonder: Is it black?

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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]

See if this rings a bell:

In 1994 the voters in Italy elected, as their leader, a flamboyant demagogic mogul with no governing experience. Silvio Berlusconi vowed to lurch Italy rightward, and the nation’s neo-fascists rejoiced. He was not a fan of free speech. During his multiple stints as prime minister, he routinely attacked the media, particularly when it investigated his ongoing conflicts of interest, declaring at one point that reporters were using TV “as a criminal means of communication.”

He was constantly targeted for prosecution, and fought off his pursuers by sliming them as commies. By 2002 only a few voices of dissent were still on TV. One was Daniele Luttazzi, a comedian whose show, Satyricon, specialized in mockery. Berlusconi, fed up with being laughed at, said publicly that Luttazzi was making “criminal use” of the airwaves, and furthermore, “I believe it’s the (TV network’s) precise duty to stop this from happening again.”

Network management did its “precise duty” by purging Luttazzi.

Something else happened in 2002. Russian President Vladimir Putin was highly displeased about a satirical TV puppet show called Kukly (translation: Dolls) that lampooned Russia’s leaders, most notably him. Laughter was thereby banned. As far as we know, nobody on the show accidentally fell from an open window, but what we do know is that the puppet’s players vanished from the air, never to return.

In retrospect, Woody Allen was prescient in one of his early movies. He played a court jester who dared to tease the king: “It’s great to be back here at the palace! You know the palace, it’s 24 living rooms and a dungeon…But seriously, I love the new exercise His Majesty does to keep in shape. It’s called taxing the peasants.” To which the king roared, “I can’t take it any longer! Not funny!” – and beheaded the jester.

And we’re supposed to be shocked about what happened to Stephen Colbert?

Anyone who flunks Tyrants 101 should be force-fed an introductory course in reality. Only clueless naifs, who in this country number in the tens of millions, could possibly have believed that someone like Colbert would be immune in a second Trump term. Typically, pigs in power are malignant narcissists with egos thinner than eggshells. They can’t abide mockery; their gut impulse is to shut it down.

Fascist oppression isn’t hard to do, especially in a degraded democracy that once revered free speech. All that’s required are corporate money-grubbers who revere the bottom line and quake in fear of a convicted criminal.

Which brings us to corporate parent company Paramount’s fatuous claim canceling Colbert was “purely a financial decision.”

Yes, Colbert’s show was losing money. Young people don’t watch late-night TV, online media has fragmented the viewing audience, and I’m embarrassed to say I typically watch Colbert’s monologue on YouTube the following day. But savings could easily have been achieved by axing more losers from CBS’ prime-time lineup (at least six shows with plummeting ratings have been renewed) – or by simply moving money around, as huge corporate entities have long been wont to do. The top priority, however, was to kiss Trump’s feet and protect Paramount’s pending merger with a Trump-friendly media company.

The health of a democracy hinges on norms and the honor system, but today there is no honor.

The upside is Colbert will likely weather this storm with his credentials enhanced. Over the next 10 months he’ll play out his CBS contract by amping up the mockery – confirming the lyrics penned long ago by Kris Kristofferson: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” – and dining to the point of gluttony on the unceasing anti-fascist feast. On Monday night’s show, it seemed like every top satirical comic showed to close ranks, and there was barely any time to savage Trump for anything besides Jeffrey Epstein.

Colbert did take a moment, however, to refer to his overlords as “the Paramount Family of Global Entertainment Properties and AI Weapons Systems.” The suits are gonna have a long 10 months.

And when his martyr gig runs its course, I assume he’ll swing a deal with a streamer that refuses to grovel, because at the end of the day it’s impossible to cancel laughter, even in our dire straits. We’ll continue to mock the thin-skinned tyrant because

“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

Mark Twain said that. And Colbert will sustain it.

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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’ve long been loath to dip a toe into the stinking MAGA sewer, lest I suffer a foot infection impervious to even the strongest antibiotics. But there are times when attention must be paid, and if I can lighten the narrative with dollops of levity, then all the better.

Which brings us to the current flap over Jeffrey Epstein, a classic illustration of Puck’s lament as penned by Shakespeare: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Trump and his apparatchiks had promised to release the so-called “Epstein files,” exposing the dead sexual predator’s ties to a purportedly secret cabal of elitist deep state pedophiles. Last fall, podcaster Dan Bongino (now the FBI deputy director) told listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal.” As recently as February, MAGA attorney general Pam Bondi told Fox News the Epstein material was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Now they’re suddenly saying that no such files exist and everyone should just move on.

It’s just fine, apparently, if the regime throws millions of people off health care and severs food assistance to the hungry and imposes tariffs that hike inflation and disappears people off the street and builds a spider’s web of gulags. But reneging on a beloved conspiracy theory is the one outrage that detonates the heads of the true believers.

Trump built his political brand by stoking conspiracy theories, and an entire right-wing media ecosystem has peddled his idiocies to millions of weak minds. He started circa 2011 with his viral lie that President Obama was not American-born (we’re still waiting to hear from the “detectives” he claimed to have hired). Ever since, we’ve been plagued by his lies about his 2020 election loss (rigged!) and his other endless bleats of nonsense.

Which brings us back to Epstein, because, supposedly, the files would prove the QAnon theory that various Democrats and liberal celebrities conspired with Epstein to run a pedophile ring that used and abused underage girls. Last year, when Trump was asked by an interviewer whether he’d release the Epstein files, he replied “Yeah, I would.” And in 2023, son Don Junior fumed on social media, “Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scumbags?”

Why indeed.

Feel free to speculate that Trump himself is listed as one of the scumbags. He told New York magazine back in 2002 that “Jeff,” his buddy of 15 years, is “a terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it.”

The problem, when you lie about everything, is that nothing means anything. Jeff the “terrific guy” has now been flushed down the Orwellian memory hole. The new message, per Trump’s social media decree, is that Epstein is “a creep” and that everyone should “STOP TALKING ABOUT EPSTEIN!!!!!” Epstein is “somebody that nobody cares about,” despite everyone in Trump’s orbit caring a great deal until Trump summarily decided to pull a 180.

And he can’t even keep his lies straight. On the one hand, he’s now saying there are no Epstein files at all; on the other hand, he’s saying that the Epstein files do exist, that the files are “Radical Left-inspired,” and that they were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.” That lie is particularly funny (to borrow a phrase from Keith Richards, it warrants “legs in the air laughter”), because none of those alleged authors were in office in 2018 when a Miami Herald report – citing more than 80 underage victims – triggered the federal probe that put Epstein in jail.

I dearly hope this Epstein flap has “legs,” that it mutates further at Trump’s expense and seriously undercuts his base support, because, frankly, that’s the only way we’ll get a shaft of sunlight in these dark times. Trump and his nuts deserve each other, and it would be popcorn entertainment indeed to watch MAGA tear itself asunder.

Which brings to mind another line from Shakespeare: “The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance, be thine in great revenue!”

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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 was first inaugurated back in 2017, I wrote with full confidence that he would “get a lot of people killed.”

Anyone with a functioning brain knew what would happen. And so it did. The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, concluded in a 2021 report Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of Covid. ” As a result, roughly 40 percent of the 470,000 deaths on his watch could’ve been avoided.

So why should anyone be shocked about the deaths of more than 100 people – including at least 30 children – down in the Texas Panhandle, where MAGA-imposed staff shortages at the National Weather Service impeded the crucial agency’s ability to communicate with local officials after flash flood warnings were issued?

Would fewer people be dead if MAGA termites hadn’t chewed the government woodwork, leaving key jobs vacant at local NWS offices?

Would at least some of those children still be alive if those jobs – staff hydrologist, staff forecaster, meteorologist in charge, science officer, and warning coordination meteorologist – had been filled? Those federal officials were tasked with helping local emergency managers plan for floods and evacuations.

As the Texas Observer noted over the weekend, “Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being wiped out, and crucial information about future risks is being destroyed or degraded.”

The key phrase is climate-augmented. It’s bad enough that the MAGA regime is wrecking the federal agencies that are tasked with saving lives. What’s even worse, going forward, is that MAGA’s mindless climate change denialism will get a lot more people killed.

If the mass drowning deaths of white Texas Christian children won’t wake MAGA up, nothing will.

I suppose we can argue whether the specific staff shortages in those local National Weather Services offices in San Angelo and San Antonia specifically exacerbated the growing Texas death toll, but let’s focus on the big picture and ask the crucial questions: Given what has happened in Texas, what lessons have the MAGAts learned? How will they plan to mitigate the inevitable disasters to come?

They won’t.

Their intentions were laid out in plain sight, evident to anyone who bothered to read the Project 2025 blueprint. It decreed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service) would be dismantled and downsized. Why? Because the agency and its components form a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”  (i.e., harmful to the fossil fuel industry, to which Trump pays obeisance).

In other words, at a time when climate change is making weather crises more deadly and severe, MAGA is destroying the feds’ ability to fight back – snuffing research grants, firing scientists, killing off climate research labs, and much more. The official MAGA explanation is that such moves are necessary to cut costs. Righto. Let the grieving families bear the cost of coffins.

Care to wonder if Trump has taken any responsibility for what happened? As if. When a reporter asked him the other day whether the key weather service vacancies played any role in ratcheting up the death toll, he replied: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden set up. That was not our set up.”

Meanwhile, the Republican governor of Texas – a climate-change denier – is pleading for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Naturally. Right-wing ideologues always profess to hate Big Guvmint until reality sits hard, then they pull a 180 and beg for love.

Trump is indeed sending FEMA to help with the cleanup. The sick twist, of course, is that his regime is busy wrecking FEMA. Roughly 20 percent of the federal staff has been slashed, its funding is being frozen, its disaster preparedness grants are being erased, its new director has no previous emergency management experience, and last month Trump said, “We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level. A governor should be able to handle it,” referring to disaster cleanups. That statement is quintessentially ignorant, because devastated states are typically too overwhelmed “to handle it” – and their woes will worsen with climate change wreaking greater havoc.

So what will happen when calamity strikes again? Rest assured, some of the people currently alive and monitoring the horrific Texas news will be the next victims of a regime that cares little about protecting its own citizens and instead prefers to spend its money building gulags on American soil.

That’s my newest cinch prediction.

Is this truly what 77 million Americans voted for? Perhaps H. L. Mencken said it best, in a newspaper essay way back in 1920: “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

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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]