Cagle World

What’s most important to remember about the monstrous “big beautiful” bill ginned up by Trump’s Reichstag is that Republicans are just being themselves. They’ve always pined to fatten the fat cats and screw the average citizen – to take from the needy and give to the rich, like Robin Hood in reverse. None of this is new.

What’s different now is the sheer scale of the cruelty, the scope of the destruction, and the spineless fealty to a fascist. And what truly galls me is the Republicans’ repugnant hypocrisy.

In 2011, President Obama proposed tax hikes on the rich in order to buttress crucial federal programs that help tens of millions of Americans. In response, the Pavlovian Republicans barked their favorite rhetorical mantra: Dems are waging class warfare!

On the Sunday talk shows, House bigwig Paul Ryan (remember him?) said, “Class warfare will simply divide this country more.” Senator Lindsey Graham echoed, “When you say you’re going to tax those (rich) people, that’s class warfare.” And when Obama floated similar priorities in 2015, Senator Orrin Hatch inveighed against “redistribution and class warfare,” while, on the House side, Republicans seethed that Obama was “returning to the theme of class warfare.”

If memory serves, the pre-Trump GOP began to chant that phrase, via frequent repetition, some time around 1992. I first heard it that year when Bill Clinton ran for president with a pledge to raise some taxes on the wealthiest Americans. In response, incumbent George H. W. Bush scoffed that his foe was waging “class warfare,” seeking to “divide Americans rich from poor, one group from another.”

See how the game works? Republicans have long instinctively understood, far better than their oft-bumbling opponents, that capturing the language is crucially important. When you do that, when you frame the terms of debate, you have a darn good shot at winning hearts and minds. Particularly weak minds.

I’ll leave it to the shrinks to diagnose the passivity of the Democratic mindset, to try to fathom why the blue party has long allowed class warfare to become a weapon in the GOP’s arsenal. In reality, the Bloated Billionaire Bill is teed up to engineer the most historic transfer of wealth from middle- and low-income Americans to the richest. It’s the GOP that has waged class warfare with great success, most notably in 2001 when George W. Bush’s top-end tax cuts helped exacerbate the growing disparity between the rich and the lower classes; and again in 2017, when Trump’s tax cuts were rigged for the rich at the expense of us lesser beings.

Republicans have long skated relatively unscathed with their insistence that taxing the rich will “divide this country” – when, in fact, the rich have long been reaping disproportionate rewards. I hesitate to cite statistics, because they’re boring and fact-free fools won’t believe them anyway, but here’s something the Wall Street Journal discovered years ago while examining the impact of the Bush tax cuts: “The average tax rate for the top 400 earners in the U.S. fell to as low as 16.62 percent in 2007, from a recent peak of 29.9 percent in 1995.”

As billionaire Warren Buffett said in a 2006 interview, “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But the richest Americans always want more – hence the current unholy alliance of oligarchy and fascism – and it’s clear that the only way a Republican can risk telling the truth is to quit the game. Exhibit A is Thom Tillis, the North Carolina senator who announced he won’t run for re-election. Having freed himself from servitude, he’s openly pissed that the MAGAts he serves with are waging class warfare against his constituents – 663,000 of whom are projected to lose their Medicaid coverage because the rich supposedly deserve more money.

In theory, Democrats should be well positioned to reap an anti-MAGA backlash in 2026 and “class warfare” should be their battle cry. It’s past time for the blue party to own that phrase and buttress it with the abundant evidence. With that goal in mind, here’s some rhetoric they can use:

“The privileged princes of the new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, (have) reached out for control over government itself. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power…In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

So said Franklin D. Roosevelt, who waged class warfare against the rich and championed the working stiff.

Seriously, how hard should that be?

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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]

If you’re tracking the urgent news about Trump and Iran, my sincere advice is you ignore every word that falls from his mouth or pops from his paws on social media.

The sociopathic liar has morphed into a bone-spurs warlord, and the last thing you want is to swallow his predictable sludge. I inadvertently saw one particular phrase – something about how the U.S. bombings were a “tremendous success” – and I couldn’t help but remember the fraud ballyhooed similar garbage about Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University, and Trump Shuttle.

Why did this self-proclaimed champion of world peace (“When I’m back in the White House, we will expel the warmongers”) suddenly turn on a dime and saddle up for Bombs Away? I’ve been writing political analysis since the early 1990s and I can state with full confidence that answering that question is a cinch. The answers are intertwined:

He needed to compensate for his ill-attended military toy parade.

He needed to compensate for his early exit from the G7 Summit, where members ignored him or treated him with the disdain he deserves.

He needed something new because he was losing multiple news cycles.

He needed a piece of the action because the Israeli strikes looked good on Fox News.

He needed to indulge his neediness because he has the biorhythms of a baby and Bibi is his binky.

Trump thinks playing warlord will make him look strong, and if dire fallout down the road triggers mass antiwar protests at home, suppressing that dissent might make him look even stronger. Foreign policy specialist Robert Kagan reminds us that civil liberties often suffer during times of strife: “Think of how Trump can use a state of war to strengthen his dictatorial control at home…Imagine what he will do when the United States is actually at war with a real country, one that many Americans fear. Will he tolerate dissent in wartime?”

77 million people freely gave life-and-death power to an empty suit who’s so incompetent, he could bankrupt a lemonade stand. I especially pity the millions of suckers who bought his worthless campaign pledge to “measure our success” by “the wars we never get into.” Hasn’t it long been obvious that virtually everything he says or vows has the intrinsic value of toilet-bound Kleenex? Hasn’t it long been obvious that this guy is so far over his head that he’d drown in a kiddy pool?

Oh well, duh people have spoken. It’s too late to stop him now. And it doesn’t matter a whit that public support for bombing Iran is anemic – only 35 percent in one national survey; only 38 percent in another – because all Trump cares about is his MAGA base. No worries there. As recently as a week ago, they loved his vow to end “forever wars,” but now that he has dropped state-of-the-art bang-bang, most mindless MAGAts have pulled a 180 to cheerlead for war – which is a helluva lot easier than thinking for oneself. To quote your average sheep, “Bahhhhh.”

Naturally, it took a grand total of one day for the warlord’s lies to be blown sky high. On social media he decreed “the sites we hit in Iran were totally destroyed and everyone knows it,” but apparently the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency didn’t get his memo because leakers have already told the press the bombing was a fiasco, that the Iranians’ highly enriched uranium wasn’t hit at all, that the targeted sites were not destroyed, and that the whole Iranian nuclear program was set back, at most, by only a few months.

The best we can hope for is Trump will convince himself he “won” something, and therefore no further military moves are needed.

Peggy Noonan, the veteran Republican commentator, suggested the other day in The Wall Street Journal that if “Tehran limps back and in time develops nuclear weapons, (Trump) will suffer with some of his base.” Um, nope. His sheep will continue to bleat no matter what. Indeed, if Iran finds a way to lash out – by killing American soldiers in their region, or staging terrorist attacks here in our homeland – rest assured that the MAGAts will find a way to believe that it’s Joe Biden’s fault.

The Greek tragedian Aeschylus reputedly said “the first casualty, when war comes, is truth.” But we don’t need a war to know that, with respect to the capacity for critical thinking, roughly half the American populace has already been bombed senseless.

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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]

With Marines on American streets and fascist disinformation invading American minds, one is compelled to wonder what Edward R. Murrow would say.

But that query is a tad irrelevant. There’s no space in today’s political media culture for an Edward R. Murrow.

Granted, if you watched George Clooney’s play “Good Night, and Good Luck” (broadcast live last weekend on CNN), or if you’ve seen his streamable 2005 movie by the same name, chances are you were stunned and disturbed by the many parallels between 1954 and now.

In Murrow’s time, right-wing pig Joseph McCarthy flooded the zone with serial lies that fouled our civic discourse and ruined countless lives. While most of the media went belly up for McCarthy, Murrow stepped up and used his CBS “See It Now” show to fact-check the demagogue in front of a mass audience – while fending off the CBS corporate jellyfishes who feared jolting Joe was bad for business.

“The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one,” Murrow said on the air (and performed in the play by Clooney), referencing Joe’s relentless attacks on Americans whom he’d falsely labeled as commies. “The junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly,” due to his “hysterical disregard (for) decency and human dignity and the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.”

That commentary resonates in today’s MAGA sinkhole, where our tinpot dictator is ordering federal “investigations” of people who’ve publicly opposed him – people like Miles Taylor, the ex-Trump homeland security official who has assailed Der Leader in print.

One resonant line in the play prompted rueful audience laughter. CBS journalist Don Hollenbeck said to Murrow, “I wake up in the morning and I don’t recognize anything…as if all the reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind.” Clooney nearly broke character and laughed as well. More serious were Murrow’s historically accurate clashes with CBS chairman William Paley. Mindful of his network’s bottom line, Paley complained that fact-checking McCarthy was a biased partisan act that would alienate the aluminum company that sponsored Murrow’s show.

“I can’t accept that on every story there are two equal and logical sides.” Murrow retorted.

That may ring a bell. Even Bob Costas, the renowned sports broadcaster, recognizes what should be obvious to all: “There really isn’t two sides to much of what Donald Trump represents…Certain things are just true. And regrettably, something that’s true in America right now is that the president of the United States has absolutely no regard, and in fact has contempt, for basic American principles and basic common decency.”

But nobody in our contemporary culture has the audience and credibility Murrow enjoyed when he took on McCarthy in 1954. If Murrow was somehow cloned for today’s information marketplace, he too would have limited clout.

Start with the cold fact the current “president” is far more powerful than “the junior senator from Wisconsin” ever was, and the current Republican Congress, unlike the 1950s era body, is little more than a rubber-stamping Reichstag.

Lest we forget, also, 70 years ago there were only three broadcast networks; Time magazine, while lauding Murrow’s “brains, integrity, attractiveness and showmanship,” said that “From his pinnacle atop the nation’s TV antennas, Murrow commands a huge circulation” – the equivalent, in today’s America, of 10 million weekly viewers. Plus, Murrow’s stories and commentaries were often amplified by the few outlets, notably The New York Times, that dominated media discourse.

But, by contrast, a contemporary Murrow would be fighting for a niche audience in competition with viral Internet trolls, Fox News’ amplification of propaganda, Tik Tok tripe, hot takes on our cellphones, under-the-radar Facebook groups that reboot MAGA lies – plus massive pushback from his own network (parent company Paramount wants to cave to Trump, settling a bogus Trump lawsuit against CBS, because it needs federal approval for a merger). And if he tried to jump to ABC, he’d wind up on the scrap heap beside Terry Moran (who got canned by ABC the other day for stating the fact that documented world-class hater Steven Miller is a world-class hater).

In his gutsy McCarthy broadcast, Murrow made the case for courage: “We will not walk in fear of one another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.” And in a 1958 speech (which Clooney recited, to close the play), Murrow urged Americans to challenge “ignorance, intolerance, indifference,” to resist “decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,” and to “fight for the very soul of this republic.”

Resonant rhetoric, all of it. But his wise words didn’t die with him. He said, “Our history will be what we make of it.”

All obstacles notwithstanding, are we strong enough to heed him and write the next chapter? Good night, and good luck.

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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]

Every once in a while, way back when I was in high school, two meatheads would agree to fight when classes let out.

They were brainless lummoxes, the kind who liked to snap kids’ jockstraps in the gym locker room, and sometimes, when they had a beef with each other, they’d head to a patch of grass just beyond school property and go wild. One guy would pull the other guy’s windbreaker over his head, the guy blinded by his windbreaker would kick the other guy’s shin, the two of them would crash to the grass as they aimed for each others’ balls, and we onlookers would laugh with delight at their expense, not knowing whom to root for because both were idiots.

I’ve unearthed that blessedly buried memory while watching Musk and Trump do their worst to humiliate themselves and this once-great nation. I see no need to recap their play-by-play. And who are we supposed to root for, anyway? This is like Hitler versus Stalin in 1941, mass murderer versus mass murderer. This is like Iran versus Iraq, trench war versus chemical war, during the 1980s. This is like the courtroom clown show in 2016 when Johnny Depp sued ex-wife Amber Heard and Amber sued Johnny back.

Look, we all knew there would be room in the Oval Office (or, as Trump says, “the oval desk”) for only one raging narcissist. We all knew this liaison would have less ballast than Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. But, speaking for myself, I didn’t think it would crash and burn over the Big Beautiful Bill just because the detestable duo apparently disagreed on how many people should lose their health care and how many poor kids should go hungry.

On the one hand, I’m on Team Trump because his flunkies want to deport Musk. On the other hand, I’m on Team Musk because he’s calling for Trump’s impeachment and suggesting (without evidence) that Trump is one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex pervs. So tough to choose – while guzzling popcorn! Perhaps the simplest solution is for Linda McMahon to put these two malignant degenerates in a wrestling ring and stream it live until someone cries uncle.

I have no idea how this Musk-Trump mudfest will play out politically or financially, nor does anyone else. I suppose it’s sufficient in the short run for us to just laugh at the spectacle of rich pricks behaving badly (we love shows like Succession, Sirens, White Lotus, and Your Friends and Neighbors), and to keep tabs on all the clowns who’ve already weighed in. (Font of depravity Alex Jones is fighting with the Trump flunky known as Catturd! But Kanye West – Kanye West of all people! – is urging Musk and Trump to cool it.)

Personally, whenever Musk or Trump ups the ante with another brainless remark, I’m reminded of lyrics from jazz pianist Mose Allison:

“Y’know if silence was golden
You couldn’t raise a dime
Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is
Working overtime.”

But here is what bothers me most: Last week was the 81st anniversary of the death of 4,427 Allied soldiers, who gave their lives during the first-wave assault on fascism. Did they die for what we have now – a fascist circus infested with felons, drunks, druggies, dopes, and all manner of incompetent lickspittles? This is supposed to be a serious country. A serious country needs to be governed seriously.

Instead what we’re seeing now is the most vivid evidence yet that MAGA is nothing more than a toxic stew of unbridled ego, tawdry self-interest, and serial trolling. Did our boys storm the beaches…for this cesspool?

The peak travel season is here, but our friends abroad have gotten the message. A new report projects travel to America will be 22 percent lower than last year – an economic loss of $12 billion.

It’s no mystery why. Shakespeare got it right in “The Tempest” when a character said, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

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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]

Until August of 1934, German judges swore an oath that reflected the spirit of the democratic Weimar republic: “I swear loyalty to the Constitution, obedience to the law, and conscientious fulfillment of the duties of my office, so help me God.”

But that fateful summer, the judicial oath was tweaked just a wee bit: “I swear loyalty to the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, obedience to the law, and conscientious fulfillment of the duties of my office, so help me God.”

Donald Trump would love to mimic what Hitler intoned on April 27, 1942: “I expect the German legal profession to understand that the nation is not here for them, but that they are here for the nation” – the national interest, as defined by Hitler – and woe to any recalcitrant judges “who evidently do not understand the demand of the hour.”

Short of that, Trump is currently doing the next worst thing: defying federal court orders whenever he thinks he can get away with it and rampaging through the wild like a predatory grizzly, chewing with malice aforethought on our democratic sinew.

Separation of powers? Nah, those are just words on old parchment.

An independent judiciary, a co-equal branch of government? Roy Cohn, his dead mobbed-up mentor, would eat that crap for breakfast.

And Trump’s impulse, as always, is to paw demagoguery on his phone, ranting about “USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK.”

On the upside (there’s an upside!), it’s been inspiring to see so many “USA hating” judges stand tall for the rule of law and thwart him at every turn. As of May 29, he has reportedly suffered 180 beatdowns in federal court since the dark day he waddled back to power. In May alone, he reportedly lost 96 percent of the cases brought against him. Even 72 percent of the Republican-appointed judges ruled against him.

Lest we forget, this is the same loser who tried to stage a coup after his 2020 election loss, only to lose 63 of 64 court cases. This guy’s win-loss record is worse than the Colorado Rockies.

His biggest beatdown came last week, when the U.S. Court of International Trade, which has broad powers over trade issues, ruled his authoritarian imposition of tariffs is patently illegal. The three judges (one of whom is a Reagan appointee; one of whom is a Trump appointee) ruled unanimously that Trump pulled his policy out of his rear.

Trump’s repeated strategy is to declare fake national emergencies in order to justify whatever he does. A 1977 law allows presidents to impose tariffs on other countries in very limited circumstances, like when there’s an “unusual and extraordinary” national security emergency. The three judges spotted Trump’s obvious con and put his sweeping tariffs in limbo. (In a separate case, a federal judge also ruled against Trump, citing the tariffs’ illegality.)

That’s been happening all over the check-and-balance scoreboard. Federal judges have blocked Trump’s attempts to kill federal research on women’s health, blocked his attempts to kill pandemic relief funding, blocked his attempts to swipe $12 million from Radio Free Europe, and blocked his attempts to fire lots of Education Department workers.

Judges have also blocked his attempts to sabotage the U.S. Agency for International Development, blocked his attempts to bar Harvard from enrolling international students, and blocked his many attempts to use a 1798 law (intended for wartime) and a 1940 law (intended for wartime) to justify his broadly illegal deportation actions.

The big question is whether all these valiant efforts will turn out to be fingers in the dike and nothing more. Authoritarians are notoriously adept at playing the long game – crushing the judiciary not with one dramatic blow, but whittling away its powers bit by bit to justify what Hitler called “the demand of the hour,” all the better to ensure that it’s barely noticed by a feckless oblivious citizenry.

At every step, Trump’s propaganda apparatchiks continue to denounce “unelected judges” and continue to claim, as Trump’s press secretary said the other day, that they are trying “to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.”

The MAGA regime’s abiding goal is to force federal judges to march in goosestep. The pressures to conform, to bow to the rising threats, will increase with each passing month. The rest of us, besieged by the onslaught on so many fronts, may be tempted to look away for the sake of our sanity. But we can ill afford a complicit judiciary staffed by “soldiers of law.”

That term was coined in 1934 by Nazi jurist Roland Freisler, who said all judges should work with Der Leader to create “combat law…like the weapon’s tip which in battle is pointed at the enemy.”

Freisler was killed on Feb. 3, 1945 during the Allied bombing of Berlin. I’m pleased to end this piece on an upbeat note.

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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 just finished reading Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin,” and at the risk of pissing off the multitude of knee-jerk Tapper-haters, their deep reporting laid out in excruciating detail what we’ve needed to hear:

That a seriously addled Joe Biden, fed by his own delusions and cocooned by his inner circle of wagon-circling sycophants, screwed us by refusing until it was far too late to hobble off stage and ultimately helped deliver us into the clutches of a convicted felon.

It pains me to write that because I long defended Joe – and his decision to run for re-election – even after smart people close to me insisted that he was ill fit for a second term. I ignored or dismissed so much of what should have been obvious and didn’t want to think of myself as “ageist.”

I remembered when Bob Dole ran for president in 1996 and was unfairly ridiculed for being 73. In 2008, when John McCain ran at age 71, David Letterman quipped: “McCain is the kind of guy who picks up the TV remote when the phone rings.”

So I just figured, hey, give Biden a break He’d returned decency to the Oval Office, he’d signed monumental legislation (the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure law), he’d steered us out of the pandemic and reestablished respect for science – and therefore “he has earned the right” to run again. That’s what I told friends. And, it turns out, that’s precisely what members of “the Politburo” – Biden’s innermost insiders – told the outside world.

And to ensure that “right,” and to pummel any skeptics into submission, they hid his alarming true condition, playing us for saps.

This particular sap (yours truly) was therefore shocked out of his shoes when the real Biden was caught on camera during the June 2024 presidential debate, the man’s mouth agape the same way my late dad’s was during his waning days in assisted living. And the wayward words that came out of Joe’s mouth…good grief.

What we didn’t know then – and what we now know, thanks to this book – is that hiding the real Joe was a full-time job. The Politburo shaved his typical working day to six hours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., which was not ideal because various episodes in the wee hours required presidential attention (aides handled those overnight tasks).

They gave him note cards and teleprompters even for tiny events, and he often botched them anyway. They insisted, in advance of many meetings, that participants supply questions in advance so that they could script answers for Biden to recite. They limited his sitdowns with Cabinet members, who went months without seeing him. They surrounded him during his stiff walks to the presidential helicopter, shielding him from cameras. They tried to script him for two-minute videos, but he’d blow the lines and the footage was unusable.

One cynical Biden aide told Tapper and Thompson that the game plan was to win in 2024 and after that, “he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”

The plan went badly awry in February 2024 when special counsel Robert Hur weighed on whether Biden should be indicted for the classified papers he’d brought home after leaving the vice presidency. Hur concluded a jury would be reluctant to convict a “well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory.” Biden’s spinners condemned Hur for those purportedly “gratuitous” remarks, and I too was suckered by that spin. In a column I denounced Hur’s “character-smearing conclusion,” which “kicked Biden’s perceived Achilles heel with extreme prejudice.”

I now stand corrected, having read the Hur transcripts that appear in Tapper’s book.

I know there are still people who think Biden would’ve won in 2024 if he hadn’t been coaxed to exit (the internal Democratic polls the Poltiburo refused to show Biden said he would’ve been slaughtered), and I get that oftentimes it’s human nature to deny reality. George Orwell (of course) said it well: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue…To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

So, naturally, the strugglers are furious about Tapper’s book. There’s the usual ” but what about” gripe, that all this coverage of Biden ignores Trump’s dangerous mental defects. I think that’s silly. Trump’s mental defects – his policy idiocy, his sociopathy, his textbook narcissism, his relentless lies – are being covered 24/7, in tandem with stories about the Tapper book. It’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. Indeed, piercing Bidenworld’s wall of bull is essential to understanding how we wound up with Trump the second time.

Another silly argument goes like this: Tapper held back all this info before the election so that he could cash in after the election! The reality is, White House insiders who covered for Biden before the election didn’t start talking til after the election. That’s typically how journalism works. As Tapper remarked in a podcast, “Very frustratingly, they (the insiders) got really honest after the election. And before that they were either not so honest or elusive or didn’t return calls and texts.”

The bottom line is Biden’s bitter-end defenders need to reckon for real with the truth. To deny the facts in Tapper’s book is to endorse this Orwellian delusion: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Except Orwell didn’t say that. Trump did. We all should be better than 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]

Say what you will about Trump (though it’s all been said before) – that he’s a tinpot totalitarian, pathological liar, corrupt grifter, convicted criminal, global laughingstock, and a snowflake whose skin is thinner than parchment. But sometimes we forget he’s also a man-child with some long-held convictions.

Exhibit A – on display at the Supreme Court the other day – is his lawless quest to blow up a constitutional right that has been embedded in our founding document for the last 159 years: the principle of birthright citizenship, which traces back to English common law, and which has twice been upheld by the high court, in 1898 and 1982.

If you’re born in America, you’re a citizen. Period. The Fourteen Amendment decrees, in straightforward prose, that “all persons born” on our soil “are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” And if that’s not clear enough, the 1898 Supremes said that birthright citizenship covers all children “born within the territory of the United States…of whatever race and color.” It’s the “race and color” part that Trump hates most. The urgent question today is whether facts and precedents are stronger than his xenophobic primal scream.

The con Trump’s currently trying to pull in the courts is fiendishly clever; like a termite, he’s gnawing away at the judicial woodwork that has long provided ballast to our democracy.

That’s his end game. To win it, he has weaponized the phony birthright issue.

When Trump returned to office four months ago (thanks a lot, 77 million voters), he immediately signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship. It ended nothing. It was immediately challenged in federal court – and three federal judges in three district courts blocked Trump’s order, via what are known as “nationwide injunctions.” That’s where things currently stand.

Trump’s lawyers and sycophants insist that because the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1866 in order to grant citizenship to former Black slaves, it therefore could never have anticipated that the 21st-century children of undocumented immigrants would be born here.

The flaw in that argument should be obvious. If an ironclad constitutional amendment can be dismissed as archaic and out of step with modern times, then shouldn’t that also apply to the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, which was tailored for the owners of muskets? I bet the MAGAts wouldn’t abide that.

But at a May 15 Supreme Court hearing, the constitutionality of birthright citizenship was not the issue per se. Trump is pissed that roughly one third of his 143 executive orders are tied up in federal courts, challenged on constitutional grounds. Trump’s lawyers therefore told our top nine jurists that federal judges in the lower courts should not have the power to thwart the king’s will. Basically, the lawyers insisted that the Supreme Court alone should have the power to rule on his executive orders.

How fiendishly clever indeed.

If that were to happen – if lower federal judges were rendered powerless and their nationwide injunctions granting immediate relief were swept away – the human beings targeted by Trump’s executive orders would be screwed for the foreseeable future. Millions of targeted people would have to wait months or years for the high court to rule – and, in the meantime, Trump’s orders will have taken effect.

If the Supreme Court sides with Trump’s lawyers (a ruling is likely in June), it’ll be one more step towards totalitarianism. In the words of Stephen Valdeck, a Georgetown law professor and incisive court-watcher, the erasure of national injunctions “would be a self-inflicted judicial wound, one from which the legal system, and perhaps the rule of law itself, will not quickly recover.”

If the Supremes erase the three national injunctions that have been issued against Trump’s birthright citizenship ban, chaos will ensue at ground level. We know this because Thursday’s high court hearing exposed that scenario.

Brett Kavanaugh asked what would happen if the executive order took effect and magically denied citizenship to immigrant babies born here. How would the MAGA regime handle that?

D. John Sauer replied: “We don’t know. Federal officials will have to figure that out. Hopefully, they will do so.”

Translation: The regime has no plan.

If Trump successfully persuades the highest court to erase those injunctions, the judiciary’s ability to curb his totalitarian ambitions may be irreparably damaged. Which is precisely what he wants.

His courtroom maneuvers may seem abstruse, but that’s where the termites are gnawing our essential woodwork. We cannot afford to allow our eyes to glaze over.

As Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century essayist, once warned, even civilized societies can fall apart when “reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodates to darkness.”

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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]

If you’ve ever visited Normandy, where the American-led freedom crusade launched the multifaceted assaults that ultimately vanquished fascism, you surely know – as I’ve just learned – that nouns and verbs and adjectives can’t begin to encapsulate the experience. I won’t even try.

Last week, I found that it was sufficient, on the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, to commune with our resting heroes in the American cemetery on the eastern end of Omaha Beach, and reflect on what it meant to be an American when America was at its best.

At home these days I feel nothing but shame, thanks to the fascists who are trampling our traditional verities and doing their very worst, but on this verdant patch of northwestern France I feel nothing but pride. We are loved over here for what we did so selflessly – American flags festoon front yards at every turn – and I can only hope the locals’ long memories, their fervent gratitude, will continue to trump whatever concerns they may harbor about a treasured ally that has lost its mind.

But I need to point out the pride I feel here is intertwined with sorrow. The cold statistics – 9,389 U.S. soldiers are interred in the aforementioned cemetery, spread over 172 immaculate acres suffused in birdsong. The names of 1,557 soldiers missing in action are emblazoned on a semicircular wall – subsume the human dimension.

Each of those kids (average age 24) had a family back home and was just a few years removed from high school sock hops and soda fountain meetups before metastasizing fascism on faraway soil hijacked their budding lives. To see a marble headstone bearing the name of a kid killed on the very first day, barely off the boat, prompted me to reflect on the hard years of training that preceded his one fateful moment.

Wilbert F. Lucka of New Jersey, a private in the 26th Infantry, I salute you.

I learned, too, about a lieutenant from Pennsylvania who was long believed to be missing forever, and whose name was thus etched on the MIA wall – until he was unearthed from a mass grave that he shared with Nazi soldiers. Which was particularly grotesque, because the lieutenant was Jewish.

Nathan Baskind, I salute you.

I learned about a U.S. Ranger from California who had just completed a grueling commando training course in Scotland, famous for its brutal hill runs and use of live ammunition, capped by weeks of amphibious landings along the English coastline. On D-Day this lieutenant made it to the sand on Omaha Beach after struggling through the surging waves. He ran toward the sea wall but machine gun fire snuffed his last conscious instant.

Robert Brice, I salute you.

I learned about one of Brice’s Ranger comrades, a sergeant from Pennsylvania who was celebrating his third wedding anniversary on D-Day. Shortly before landing on Omaha, his buddies sang songs to celebrate the occasion. Minutes later he was cut down. He is not interred in Normandy, but his widow, who survived him by 58 years, requested that she be buried beside him.

Walter Geldon, I salute you.

And I thought about Mildred Reed, a wife and mother from Manhattan, Kansas. Her husband Ollie and her son Ollie Jr. rest side by side in Normandy. The junior Ollie, an Army lieutenant, was killed in Italy on July 6. The senior Ollie, an Army colonel, was killed in Normandy on July 30. Mildred learned of her husband’s death and her son’s death in separate telegrams that arrived at her home 45 minutes apart.

Needless to say, I salute her too.

None of these Americans were “suckers” and “losers.” They answered the call because they took it on faith that their country was good and that whoever was president would follow the Constitution. I bet they never could’ve imagined a time when a president, queried as to whether he’ll honor our founding document, would respond by saying “I don’t know.”

On V-E Day, our Normandy guide, a font of historical wisdom named Marie, quoted the philosopher George Santayana, who famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Marie thinks that’s an apt remark, “given what we see going on in the world.” I think it’s especially apt given that a certain individual is too stupid to have even learned of the past, much less to have drawn any lessons from it.

Now the fight against fascism has reached our shores. We who recognize this existential threat must ensure that those who died for democracy did not do so in vain.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

I suppose I should add my voice to the chorus of stories about the convicted felon’s first 100 days, but I’d rather change the subject. Believe it or not, there’s other stuff going on.

Let’s talk instead about a shrewd new novel written by Ken Kalfus, who, with wise concision and wry humor, has limned some “comically appalling” aspects of our contemporary culture. As one of his characters says, “We have to recognize this is the moment we live in.”

“A Hole in the Story” takes place in 2019, when Max, a legendary Washington magazine editor, is outed for a sexual harassment incident that happened in 1999. An esteemed journalist named Adam Zweig gets swept into the maelstrom because he may have known a little or a lot about the Max episode but said nothing at the time for reasons he may or may not fully understand or wish to acknowledge. The whole thing metastasizes on social media, with satirical elements that feel all too real.

In the spirit of transparency, Kalfus and I are friends. We lunch occasionally to talk politics, writing, and baseball. But I’ve been intrigued about the premise of this book since he first referenced it a few years ago – this is his fifth novel – and I was rightly confident that he’d capture the zeitgeist and etch memorable characters with his usual brio. Plus, there’s a scene in Trump’s Washington hotel…but I wouldn’t want to spoil that.

Anyway, we engaged at length. This is an edited version of a longer conversation I shared on my Substack newsletter this week:

Q: What specific incidents or trends prompted you to write this book? 

A: Social media was key to the #MeToo movement and to the breadth and intensity of the public response; it’s been intrinsic to every public phenomenon of, say, the last ten or fifteen years. In the case of my novel, I knew from the start that Twitter (as we once knew it, before Musk) would determine Max’s fate, even if he declares he doesn’t take social media seriously. As I worked my way into the story, Twitter became even more important to the plot. But sexual harassment is the first and central theme of the novel.

Q: Your novel takes place in 2019, a year or two after the titanic news dump about Harvey Weinstein. Six years later, there’s great support for “woke” and #MeToo, but today even some progressives think it may have gone too far. Is that a fair point?

A. That’s Adam’s thought, in the moment, not mine – though I mostly agree with the observation, with qualifications. At the height of #MeToo, there were indeed excesses, there was misjudgment, and there was reductionism. People were hurt unfairly. But it’s the baleful nature of our media environment to amplify extreme responses, on all issues, so that we react to the excesses; so that the excesses stand for the issue, whatever it is: reactions to Gaza, Israel, policing, etc. And then we lose sight of what matters.

No, I don’t think #MeToo went too far. I think the movement was an especially salutary phenomenon, in that it had us reconsidering and reflecting on relations between men and women, in the past and now. My novel draws from that reflective process, particularly from the stories I heard from women friends and men. We all heard stories. Some stories were appalling, some were comic and some, as in my novel, were comically appalling. We may have hoped that the movement would have effected changes in the ways we treat each other. Well, maybe it has. Mores have changed. And hopefully the conversation can continue, a bit more thoughtfully and generously.

I regret that the term #MeToo has become either jokey and trivializing or a stand-in for overreaction.

Q: Your book also has much to say about contemporary political journalism and its practitioners. MAGA voters dismiss the whole process as “fake news,” but clearly people like Adam are trying to get as close to the truth as possible, even if the world keeps moving on. Do you agree?

A. I have great respect for journalists and I revere journalism as an institution. Like other institutions I admire, including science and the law, it’s occupied by fallible, myopic, often foolish, often selfish men and women with complicated personal lives (nobody either of us knows, of course). This can make for institutional failure. It may also give us the opportunity for entertaining literature.

Reporting is actually hard work (as is the pursuit of science, law and literature) and reporters make mistakes, as Adam acknowledges with frustration. It’s important to communicate to readers the process: the finding of sources, the demands of storytelling, etc. – basically Reporting 101 – so they can judge how much confidence to put into any given story. But the fact that a practice and its practitioners are flawed doesn’t make it Fake.

The other issue, for Adam, is the tension inherent in journalistic commentary. A big-shot Washington columnist wants to have a long-term impact on the nation’s history, but by its nature the products of journalism are ephemeral. This creates an internal conflict that can be comic as well as tragic.

Q: What is it that you’d love readers to be thinking about most, once they’ve finished the book? 

A: Like most novelists, I mostly hope readers will take away from my books some appreciation of my characters’ interior lives. I’ve spoken to quite a few readers about A Hole in the Story, I’m gratified about the range of responses, especially about how different readers judge Adam, Max and Valerie. This suggests that readers are considering the characters in the context of their own experiences and the story’s themes of workplace sexual harassment and social media. I’m happy about that. One of the promises of literature is that it will give us insight, first, into minds that are not our own, and then into our own ways of thinking. This of course has social and political consequence.

But I’m also pleased when readers tell me they laughed. It’s meant to be a funny novel!

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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]

While sunning myself the other day at a Phillies game, I was tempted to pivot to two bros sitting behind me and say: “How about that awesome federal court ruling from J. Harvie Wilkinson! Is that guy eloquent or what?”

The scoreboard said 45,045 fans had flocked to the game. But rest assured that 45,044 didn’t sit there thinking about J. Harvie Wilkinson, the right of due process, the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – nor the fact that an incipient fascist is running amuck like a junkyard dog, gnawing the rule of law like it’s his personal chew toy.

I find it depressingly surreal that we can fill a ballpark on a balmy afternoon, seemingly swaddled in normalcy like it’s any other year while people like Garcia are being disappeared off our streets in defiance of basic human rights and core American principles. It’s all too easy in each ephemeral moment to be deaf, dumb, and blind about what’s going on.

So how fortunate we are that certain members of the federal judiciary – U.S. District judges James Boasberg and Paula Xinis, and even most Supreme Court justices – are confronting Trump and his MAGestapo, most notably on behalf of Garcia. It’s comforting to know that at least one of our venerable institutions refuses to march in goosestep and embrace Selbstgleichschaltung – the Nazi term for “bringing oneself into line.”

But Wilkinson – a federal appeals judge, a Ronald Reagan appointee, a prominent conservative on the bench these past 40 years – tops the list. Having studied all the relevant facts about Garcia (who, unlike Trump, has never been charged or convicted of a crime; who was labeled a terrorist and flown to El Salvador despite a dearth of evidence and despite the MAGA regime’s admission that he was exiled in error), Wilkinson decided last week that enough was enough.

Ruling that the Trump regime should arrange Garcia’s return to the U.S. as soon as possible, Wilkinson scorched the MAGAts with punitive eloquence, warning the administration’s actions “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Wilkinson freely conceded courts aren’t perfect, but did point out they “instill a fidelity to law that would be sorely missed in their absence.” Then he wrote the passage that should rightly chill Americans:

“The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”

I question whether finely honed sentences can compete with the brute exercise of power. Trump is defying the courts, refusing to return Garcia to this country where he has long lived (and protected by a 2019 court ruling), because, in Trump’s twisted mind, judges are mere speed bumps for his bulldozer.

Wilkinson is wise to the unprecedented danger. He capped his ruling with a wistful plea for peace:

“Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both… We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”

We need not ponder whether Trump is capable of summoning whatever passes for the best within him. The time clock is ticking. Most Americans “far removed from courthouses” might not know who Abrego Garcia is, or care a whit what happens to him, but in truth he’s a test case, a way for Trump to determine what he can get away with, a way to potentially stress the courts until they break – and heaven help us if or when that happens.

We already know what could await us at the bottom of the slippery slope. Here’s the bottom: “It is not a judge’s duty to help to enforce a law that’s superior to (the party), or to impose a system of universal values.” Instead, a judge should simply issue rulings “as expressed in the party program.” So said Nazi lawyer Hans Frank, the Reich Commissioner for Justice, in 1936.

Ten years later Frank was hanged by the Allies. Good riddance.

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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]