Cagle World

No doubt you’ve noticed the MAGA regime is infested with incompetent dolts who couldn’t run a lemonade stand – people who are, in the immortal words of Charles Dickens, “dumb as a drum with a hole in it.”

And you’re probably wondering how this could possibly have happened in an allegedly advanced western nation.

In some celestial realm, Alexander Hamilton is wondering as well. In the 76th Federalist Paper, he wrote an American leader would surely be “both ashamed and afraid” to hire “for the most distinguished or lucrative stations” people whose top traits are “insignificance and pliancy,” thus making them “the obsequious instruments” of the leader’s “pleasure.”

Down in lower Manhattan, Hamilton has rolled over in Trinity Churchyard.

But it’s not sufficient to simply point out that 77 million Americans voted willingly for the dumbest white man in the land – someone who, according to right-leaning pundit David Brooks, “personifies stupidity,” someone whose stupidity “is the achievement of a lifetime” – because, sadly in truth, we’ve long been careening toward our current debacle, fueled by the batshit populist belief that ignorance is good and expertise is bad, that anyone who breathes can be an instant expert.

So, to truly understand why we’re sinking ever deeper into the quicksand of stupid, why we’re saddled with umpteen nitwits like Fox News drunk Pete Hegseth, tinfoil-hatted RFK Jr., and ex-wrestling CEO Linda McMahon (the Education secretary who confuses AI with “A-1,” the steak sauce), we need to book a trip down memory lane.

There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in the American mindset, and the scandals of Vietnam and Watergate, which bared so much horrific behavior at the top, have clearly abetted the populist belief that average Joes could run this country better than the fancypants “elites.” Alas, we’ve now taken that impulse to its destructive extreme.  Putting a dingbat like Trump in the White House – twice! – is the apogee of dumbed-down egalitarianism.

But actually, it was George W. Bush who took that ‘tude for a test drive. We tend to forget that. Granted, he looks like Cicero compared to what we’ve got now, but let’s refresh our memories.

Bush tapped someone named Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court, praising her as “the best person I could find.” It turned out that Miers had written a grand total of three legal articles (including a promotional story about bar association seminars), and that her most noteworthy legal achievement was handling paperwork for Bush’s fishing cabin. Bush also promoted a 24-year-old named George Deutsch to a key post in NASA. The kid had no science background and never graduated college, but that didn’t stop him from censoring NASA scientists’ attempts to talk publicly about global warming.

Most infamously, Bush lauded his FEMA director, Michael Brown (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job!”) despite Brown’s incompetence during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. I’m still wondering how the key job of aiding distressed citizens was given to a guy with no on-the-ground experience in emergency management, a guy whose top cred was 12 years at the International Arabian Horse Association.

And when Bush was winding down as a lame duck in 2008, along came Sarah Palin. Best remembered as John McCain’s Hail Mary veep pick, she was somehow deemed qualified to be a heartbeat from the presidency despite being unable to name any newspapers that she read, being allergic to facts (she said Alaska produced “nearly 20 percent” of our domestic energy, but the accurate stat was 3.5), and knowing zip about the world (she didn’t know there were two Koreas, or that England’s queen was just a figurehead). In hindsight, she helped plow the soil for Trump.

And so here we are, saddled with stupid, and we know where stupid can lead. In the words of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The stupid person…is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.” He got that right. Eighty years ago this month, the Nazis stripped him naked and hung him on the gallows.

The best upbeat scenario is that at some point we’ll come to our senses and rediscover a respect for knowledge and expertise. Adam Kinzinger, the ex-congressman and anti-fascist Republican, said the other day, “I feel confident in predicting that history will judge this decade or so as the absolutely stupidest time in American history. Honestly, our kids and grandkids will read about this time and be shocked that adults existed.”

I suppose that depends on who gets to write that history. Will it be with a pen or a crayon?

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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]

Way back in the sixth century B.C., a Chinese philosopher named Lao Tzu reputedly said that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – an aphorism that today’s marching foes of MAGA fascism would be wise to remember.

It was great to see so many patriots take it to the streets over the weekend, even though the mainstream media couldn’t agree on a tally (CNN said “millions,” USA Today said “tens of thousands,” while the New York Times simply punted, saying it was “difficult to estimate”). What we don’t know is whether, or to what extent, the nationwide protests can rekindle the flickering flame of democracy. The totalitarians have Uncle Sam in a chokehold, and rest assured they will take any and all necessary means to tighten their grip.

And a word of caution: While it surely felt great to pound the pavement with like-minded peeps, big crowds don’t necessarily move the political needle. Kamala Harris drew big crowds in the swing states, but lost all seven. Bernie Sanders, during the 2016 primaries, drew massive throngs before losing his nomination bid. Simply put, most folks don’t vote with their feet.

But the “Hands Off” organizers – speaking for a broad coalition of groups ranging from the ACLU and the AFL-CIO to the League of Women Voters – insist the actions thus far are only the beginning: “We are setting out to build a massive, visible, national rejection” of the MAGA infection.

That had better be true, because I also remember the huge marches that greeted Trump when he was first inaugurated in 2017. “Resistance” T-shirts were everywhere, never to be worn again. The seemingly incipient movement fizzled, and we were left with a loon who told us to fight a pandemic by drinking bleach.

This time around, he and his emboldened apparatchiks are hoping that what has worked so well in Russia can be replicated here, that people will just give up in despair. But we’re not like the Russians, who’ve been deadened en masse by centuries of despotism. A sizable share of our citizenry seems to be increasingly repulsed by what Congressman Jamie Raskin called “the politics of Mussolini and the economics of Herbert Hoover.” If a “massive, visible” protest movement can be built and sustained, it would undercut the MAGAts’ most cherished hope.

And maybe such a movement would even breathe life into the Democratic corpse, signaling to those wimps that if they can get their act together, millions of people will have their backs. The polls already signal that this is so.

Three weeks ago, a Reuters/Ipsos survey found only 32 percent of Americans gave Trump a thumbs-up for handling “the cost of living” – and that was before he decreed his inflationary tariffs. When Americans in that poll were asked what issues Trump should prioritize, 61 percent said inflation and, by the way (yo, Elon Musk!), only 13 percent said “shrinking the size of the federal government.”

Some Republicans – the sane ones, anyway – sense trouble ahead. Kristen Soltis Anderson, who polls for the GOP, wrote the other day that “it becomes easy to rest on one’s laurels and miss the bubbling rage of the other side…Trump is supercharging the anger” via his tariffs and mass federal government firings. “This is exactly the kind of dynamic that deepens the frustration and anger of a large group of very personally affected voters, who will seek to send a message” – ultimately “at the ballot box.”

She’s assuming, however, that the 2026 midterm balloting will be free, fair, and on the square. That would be nice, but I’m not so sanguine. Unpopular autocrats do whatever it takes to retain power. Chris Murphy, the indomitable Democratic senator, spelled out, in a recent interview, what I’ve long been fearing:

“Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026…What I’m talking about is that the (Democratic) opposition – the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win – will be destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. (Trumpists) will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar donations. They will threaten activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our door-knock events. This is what happens to a lot of democracies around the world – the opposition is just kept so weak that they can’t win. That’s what I worry about.”

Talk about buzzkill.

Believe it, though. As I wrote in December, “Anyone who’s still in denial about what awaits us should be indicted for failure of imagination.”

The only option left is to march in the streets – just as hundreds of thousands of Israelis did in 2003, protesting Benjamin Netanyahu so fiercely the right-wing autocrat backed off on his plans to seize power from the judiciary. I don’t know whether sustained protests would kick-start the Democrats and curb MAGA’s momentum, but does anyone have a better idea?

If not, what I can say with confidence is that a long slog is in the offing, one step at a time. Lao Tzu got that 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]

One month from today I’m flying to France to join a World War II tour, and I suspect that some curious European will ask me to explain or defend you know what. I’ll simply say, “J’ai honte de mons pays,” which means “I am ashamed of my country.”

The reasons are too numerous to mention, but three numbers top the list: 63 million (the voters who flocked to Trump in 2016), 74 million (his tally in 2020, albeit in a losing cause), and 77 million in 2024. Only in America can an evil imbecile fail upwards, propelled by an ascending tally of balloters, despite repeated promises to destroy this nation from within and sabotage its global standing.

Some people – like CNBC’s Jim Cramer (“I feel like a sucker”) – seem to be stunned by Trump’s newly-announced tariffs on all imports. By the inevitably instant stock market plummet and the immediate deleterious impact on our savings, nest eggs, 401(k)s, and rainy-day cookie jars. By the imminent prospect of price hikes on everything from cars to clothes to coffee, courtesy of retaliating countries that once were our allies.

It’s safe to bet that even some MAGA voters will dimly recall Trump vowed during the 2024 race to reduce inflation, not stoke it with wanton abandon.

But here’s my response to anyone who’s inexplicably shocked: What did you expect?

Trump openly campaigned on a promise to destroy our leadership position in the world, both militarily (by weakening NATO) and economically (by launching a global trade war). As far back as 2018, during his first term, he fought with Canada and reportedly told his aides, “I want tariffs! Bring me tariffs!” He road-tested his plan by slapping hefty levies on Canadian steel and aluminum, prompting denunciations from commie organizations like the National Retail Federation and The Wall Street Journal.

He doubled down on his obsession during the 2024 campaign when he said publicly that “to me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. It’s my favorite word.” At another event he said, “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented.” He dreamed of implementing tariffs in the range of “100, 200, 2000 percent.” When The Journal and the nonpartisan Peterson Institute of International Economics warned that he was nuts – a Peterson report said that his “package of policies does more damage to the U.S. economy than to any other in the world” – he attacked the people with credentials, claiming that “I’ve always been very good at mathematics.”

J. V. Last, a political analyst at The Bulwark (an anti-Trump outlet founded by Republicans), said only three reasons can explain why a fatal share of American voters elected this guy despite his open vows of economic destruction: (1) “They wanted what he promised,” and/or (2) “They didn’t believe what he promised” and/or (3) “They didn’t understand what he promised.”

I’ll add a fourth possible reason: They didn’t bother to listen to what he promised. His mouth moved, that was good enough.

As Trump himself declared in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.” He bonds with his peeps because he’s one of them. In a column last fall I wondered, “Are there enough poorly-educated voters to once again coronate the sultan of stupid?”

Now we know.

I kinda liked the economy Joe Biden bequeathed us, the one that senior Moody’s analyst Mark Zandi called “rip-roaring…among the best economies in my 35-plus years as an economist.” But hey, that’s just me. I can’t fathom being stupid enough to entrust the economy to a guy who went bankrupt running cash-cow casinos.

The question, going forward, is whether we’re irrevocably doomed. Fortunately, there are some signs of life – green shoots, as it were. The Bernie Sanders-AOC road show is drawing sizable crowds. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut senator, is relentlessly vocal. House Republican toadies are under attack at their own town halls. Furious citizens are in the streets. And this week Cory Booker put his body on the line for 25 hours, hoping to light what he called “thousands of ignition points” for rightly pissed-off Americans.

“How much more will we take of this?” Booker asked.

If there is sufficient will to thwart the authoritarians and restore a semblance of sanity, perhaps the words of Frederick Douglass (as quoted by Booker) can inspire the energized:

“The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

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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]

The biggest upside of hunkering down with the fat new bio of longtime SNL producer Lorne Michaels is that it’s veritable Novocaine — it numbs the pain of tracking Team MAGA’s daily idiocies.

Inevitably, some squalid acts by the moron squad are bound to break through, such as Trump’s national security guys using Signal, a hackable commercial messaging app, to discuss classified war plans…with a prominent journalist inadvertently in the loop.

If a Democratic White House ever did something so reckless and stupid — and potentially illegal — rest assured heads would be detonating throughout the wingnut infauxtainment complex.

National security attorney Bradley Moss nailed it perfectly: The commercial app, “is absolutely not authorized for any type of classified discussion…(The high-ranking MAGAts) demonstrated nothing less than complete disregard for the very nature of secure communications. These are officials who are trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has, who serve in some of the most sensitive positions within the U.S. government with all kinds of authority and leverage and discretion, and they are acting like 14-year-old children on this chat, thumping their chest and sending emojis back and forth the way my teenage daughter does.”

It’s like what Casey Stengel said about his hapless New York Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” But at least the Mets were lovable. How far we have fallen from the early 1940s, when the deadly threat of Nazism was countered by Frankin D. Roosevelt. Thanks, electorate!

The chat details are devastating. When did Pete Hegseth and his band of boyos start using Signal for classified discussions, which are supposed to take place on secure government text chains to ensure the info is protected and later archived under the Federal Records Act? What else have they said that could be hacked by hostile foreign actors? How are America’s allies (assuming we still have some) supposed to trust that their most sensitive shared intel will be safeguarded?

Will this flagrant national security breach (perhaps one of many, for all we know) get the kind of blanket coverage that Hillary Clinton’s comparatively innocuous email “scandal” received in 2016?

It’s time for mainstream media (or what’s left of it) to step up — as a matter of fairness and in recognition that the Signal app scandal deserves the kind of blanket coverage Hillary Clinton’s comparatively innocuous email “scandal” received in 2016.

I can state with certitude that one big reason why Trump wasn’t stomped at the starting gate nine years ago is because the media did his bidding by gnawing with impunity on Hillary’s nothingburger.

She was wrong to use a private server as secretary of state. But the FBI said there was nothing to prosecute, and a 2019 State Department report said there was “no persuasive evidence” of any criminality. That was Trump’s State Department, by the way.

It’s weird that Trump assails reporters as “enemies of the people,” because he owes his ascent to their obsession with Hillary’s emails. For most of 2015 and 2016, they covered the “story” relentlessly, despite the dearth of actual evidence she’d breached national security. The paltry meal was stuffed with fillers like “Questions are being raised.”

This was a typical New York Times paragraph in August 2015: “But the email account and its confusing reverberations have become a significant early chapter in the 2016 presidential race and a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate.”

When Hillary was exonerated in 2019 by the State Department report, The Times buried its piece on page 16 and said that State’s announcement “appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Um…she was “dogged” by the “controversy” precisely because the press went overboard on the dogging. Two careful researchers subsequently pointed out: “In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

One commentator, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, did cop to his complicity. On the air after State’s exoneration, he said: “This is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on (Hillary’s emails) and that’s something that I have felt a great deal of responsibility for, because I talked about the emails here at CNN. I wrote about it in The New Yorker, and I think I paid too much attention to them, and I regret that, and I hope a lesson is learned.”

Yeah, we’ll see about that. Compared to what we already know about the MAGA team’s national security breach, Hillary basically jay-walked in traffic. If the mainstream media fails to give dogged disproportionate weight to the current reverberating scandal, it will be committing a crime against truth.

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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]

Wow, a chance to write about a baseball player! Thanks, MAGA!

You may have heard what happened the other day. Trump’s apparatchiks, in their quest to scrub all vestiges of racial diversity from federal websites (they call diversity “a form of Woke cultural Marxism”), somehow saw fit to erase Jackie Robinson from the Pentagon’s online roll call of athletes who’d served their country.

Yes, that Jackie Robinson.

His military service during World War II was flushed down the Orwellian memory hole some time on Tuesday. We think it was Tuesday. An ESPN reporter noticed that Jackie’s page was gone on Tuesday night, so it’s not clear how long the erasure was actually in effect, because the enemies of “cultural Marxism” haven’t provided a timeline. Even if they were to do so, I’m disinclined to believe anything they’d say.

What we do know is that some time on Wednesday afternoon, they restored Robinson’s page to the Pentagon website via what they called a “digital content refresh.” I’ll quote their gobbledygook:

“We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed – either deliberately or by mistake – that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content…”

I don’t speak MAGA, but I can translate:

“Oops.”

Naturally, they failed to specify whether Robinson’s erasure was done “either deliberately or by mistake,” indeed whether the scrubbers’ zeal was wrongfully “out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive,” but now that the “components” are back in place (as are others), I do have a modest suggestion for the Pentagon, a suggestion about Robinson that of course carries no weight.

As punishment for that erasure, it would behoove the scrubbers to beef up one particular “component” of Robinson’s military stint. The page devotes a total of three lines – one terse paragraph – to the fact that he was court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of an Army bus. There’s so much more to that story, and the scrubbers should be compelled to tell it. As an act of penance.

They could just copy/paste what I’ve got here – and these are just highlights:

On an Army base in Texas, on July 6, 1944, 2nd Lieutenant Robinson visited what was called “the colored officer club,” then boarded a shuttle bus and sat in a middle row next to Virginia Jones, the wife of a fellow Black officer. The white bus driver mistakenly thought Jones was white, so he yelled: “Hey, you, sittin’ beside that woman – get to the back of the bus!”

Robinson refused. He told the driver – accurately – that military buses had been desegregated. But the driver called his dispatcher to say that a “n–” on the bus was making trouble. Robinson (according to his own subsequent testimony) told the driver, “Stop f– with me” and “Look here, you son of a b–, don’t you call me no n–.”

Soon after, the military police handcuffed Robinson, shackled his legs, and drove him to MP headquarters. At the HQ, a white enlisted man called Robinson a “n–,” and, as Robinson later testified, “I told him that if he ever called me a n– again, I would break him in two.”

On August 2, a nine-member court-martial panel was convened to hear The United States v. 2nd Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson. Six votes were required to convict. Only five did so. But Robinson was scarred by the experience, and later lamented his acquittal “was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.”

Actually, that victory was pivotal. Had Robinson been convicted and dishonorably discharged, it’s highly doubtful Dodgers owner Branch Rickey would’ve chosen a Black guy tossed from the Army to break baseball’s color line.

The Pentagon’s scrubbers are welcome to paste that material on Robinson’s page – although those “components” would probably strike them as anti-white or culturally Marxist.

But wouldn’t they like another time at bat? Nah, you all know the answer.

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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 been fascinating to watch Elon Musk and his destructive dweebs aim their sledgehammers at Social Security.

I almost wish they’d screw just a wee bit with the monthly money that 72 million people dependably receive — say, some delivery delays and under-payments here and there — because maybe that might finally compel lots of MAGA voters to wake the hell up.

As a Social Security recipient myself, I’m willing to take that kind of hit if it serves the greater good. Failing outright sabotage, however, I’m kind of hoping that the Putin-Musk-Trump troika sustains its current assaults – mapping office closures, stealing our private info, smearing Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” — because such hostility has always been political suicide.

According to 2024 exit polls, half of those aged 65 and older voted for Trump. How will those red voters feel if their Social Security payments show up late in their online accounts or not at all? If it’s indeed no longer possible to engage their intellects in the interests of sanity, then perhaps a hard whack in the wallet might move the needle.

Social Security has long been wildly popular. In a Pew Research poll last year, 79 percent of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) said benefits “should not be reduced in any way.” Last month, in an AP-NORC poll, 67 percent of Americans said we’re spending “too little” on Social Security. Indeed, according to Gallup, 60 percent of beneficiaries say that Social Security is their “major source of income.”

It has long been axiomatic that you don’t mess with that money. Dwight Eisenhower knew this way back in 1954; in a letter to his brother, the Republican president wrote: “The federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it.” More than 50 years later, Republican operative Rich Galen told me the party’s sporadic attempts to cut or privatize Social Security always backfired: “We have a long history of getting the you-know-what kicked out of us.”

Consider 1964, when Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater mused about making Social Security voluntary – i.e. no longer requiring workers to pay the taxes that fund the program. That stance helped fuel his landslide loss of 44 states.

And consider 2005, when Republican president George W. Bush went on the road to wow audiences with his plan to partially privatize the program. The more he talked, the worse he did. Gallup tracked the disaster. In February 2005, 50 percent of Americans said they disliked Bush’s brainstorm. Four months later, 62 percent signaled thumbs down.

And consider 2011, when Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry denounced Social Security as “a monstrous lie…a Ponzi scheme.” (Sound familiar?) Perry, briefly deemed the front-runner, ultimately tanked for a number of reasons — starting with the fact that he was a dolt — but burning his fingers on America’s third-rail issue was high on the list.

And consider 2022, when Florida Senator Rick Scott had the bright idea of sunsetting Social Security — in plain English, allowing the program to expire. Scott’s fellow Republicans in D.C., nervous about the midterm elections, were so horrified they compelled Scott to disavow his own pipe dream.

By the way: The “Ponzi scheme” mantra, resurrected by Musk, is particularly moronic. Charles Ponzi was a swindler who conned his investors by promising 100 percent returns within three months, all while keeping them in the dark. By contrast, the Social Security Administration publicly reports its finances, tracking how workers’ payroll taxes are converted into benefits.

I paid those taxes for 50 years so that seniors could reap the rewards. That’s been our social compact for nearly a century. Now it’s my turn to collect. Contrary to what Musk says, this is not an “entitlement,” a word which his ilk equates with welfare. We older folks earned our payments after funding the program our entire working lives.

So I hope Musk keeps flapping his yap. But if his deputy president wants to escape political damage, he should say this: “We must make greater and more successful efforts to strengthen Social Security…In so doing, we build for the future, and we prove to the watching world that a free nation can and will find the means, despite the tensions of these times, to progress toward a better society.”

So said Dwight Eisenhower in his 1954 message to Congress.

But why would MAGA listen to him? Ike fought against fascism, and he left suckers and losers in the soil of Normandy. For those sins alone, he’d surely tank in today’s Republican primaries.

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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]

In addition to Jeff Bezos’ worst sin – gutting The Washington Post’s journalistic mission in order to suckle at Trump’s teat – it turns out that the wanton oligarch is also a terrible writer.

Consider the billionaire’s sudden announcement that, forthwith, “every day,” Post opinion writers shall prioritize only two topics – “personal liberties and free markets” – and that anyone who dares deviate from those “pillars” shall henceforth be censored. It’s bad enough that he’s laying pipe to build MAGA’s Pravda; it’s insult to injury that his blathering wordplay would earn him a C in middle school.

For starters, a teacher would look at those two “pillars” and ask all kinds of obvious questions:

– How broadly or narrowly does Bezos define “personal liberties?” Does that include the liberty of a child to sit in class safely, freed from the threat of an AR-15 shooter? Or the liberty of women to control their own bodies? Or the liberty of enjoying good health, buttressed annually by flu and Covid shots?

– When Bezos decrees that his opinion writers shall henceforth extol “free markets” because “free markets…are right for America,” how does he square the term with the fact Trump is still determined to slap hefty tariffs on the goods we get from Canada and Mexico?

– When he says “a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else,” what do those italicized words refer to? Is he talking about other realms of freedom in America? Or other economic realms around the world? (Who knows.)

– And when he says that “Freedom is ethical – it minimizes coercion,” what the hell is he talking about? The sentence is incoherent. And is it not blatantly unethical and coercive to handcuff the Post’s opinion writers and curb their First Amendment freedoms?

Fascism feasts on corporate greed. It metastasizes when selfish moguls coldly calculate the best way to protect their bottom line (and federal contracts) is to bow down and play ball, for fear of being financially bled. First Bezos came for the editorial writers. Now he has come for the opinion writers. Gene Weingarten, a former Post humor columnist, warns: “This is just the beginning. Coverage of the news will come next.”

If true (and there’s no hard evidence), that would be the ultimate breach. At the University of Pennsylvania, I hosted Ann Gerhart, a Post deputy managing editor. Coincidentally, the Bezos bombshell had detonated just hours earlier. When asked about potential threats to the main newsroom, she said:

“I’ve been at The Post the whole time Bezos has been the owner. There’s never been any interference in the news operation to date. I think that is what we expect to continue… I can’t really say what will happen going forward… Among all the things people don’t know about the media is, they don’t clearly understand the Berlin Wall we have constructed between the editorial/opinion operation and the news operation…We have already tried to make clear that we have separate operations…We’ll have to see how it shakes out.”

OK, no interference – “to date.” She “can’t really say what will happen going forward.” We’ll see whether that Berlin Wall ultimately holds up – or crumbles like the Maginot Line, the vaunted French defense bulwark that bent to the weight of the Nazi blitzkrieg.

More than 250,000 Post subscribers severed their digital ties last fall when Bezos ordered the paper not to endorse the sole anti-fascist on the presidential ballot. His latest oppressive act has triggered another exodus, and I’m tempted to cancel mine too because I signed up in the first place to read the great opinion writers. I suspect that Dana Milbank, Karen Tumulty, Ruth Marcus, and E. J. Dionne, aren’t sleeping well.

But nixing my subscription would hurt people like deputy editor Gerhart, who’s busting her ass to put out a quality news section and support the reporters who toil under tough conditions as far away as Ukraine. It’s expensive to keep them safe and well-equipped for the job. So, for as long as practicable, I want to buttress those who are still on the front lines of press freedom, cranking out Post stories about Trump voters screwed by Trump, and Musk’s mass firings, and emboldened neo-Nazis threatening a majority-Black Ohio suburb.

My choice – my “personal liberty” – is to sustain my Post subscription (for now) while ratcheting up donations to other outlets that are fighting the good fight free from the whims of billionaire dopes. ProPublica fits the bill. The Bulwark, too. Ditto The Contrarian and News Not Noise. Plus The Atlantic and The Guardian.

As avenues of protest, those are a start. I think. As for Bezos, he won’t suffer a whit unless we all boycott Amazon (fat chance), junk our Prime Video subscriptions (but how else are we to watch Jack Reacher?), and cease all visits to Whole Foods ( but I love the deli turkey). Such is life under the corporate heel.

As my father used to grouse, “That’s how they getcha!” I’m thankful he got to miss this nonsense.

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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 only we could all be like Danielle Sassoon, who told the thugs to stick their crime where the sun don’t shine.

Hard as it’s been for us sane Americans to navigate the MAGA idiocracy, the journey has been even more torturous this past month for public servants who still believe in venerable America values like the rule of law.

This dilemma is not new. Typically, cogs in the government wheel suspend their consciences and bend to the prevailing winds, fearful of job loss and mindful that they have mouths to feed at home. It has long been that way. Chalk it up to human nature.

But along comes Sassoon and six other Justice Department lawyers, quitting en masse instead of doing Trump’s dirty work. Even better, Sassoon (until her departure, the top U.S. attorney for Manhattan) and Hagan Scotten (until his departure, an assistant U.S. attorney for Manhattan) tongue-lashed their oppressors in eloquent resignation letters.

Sassoon, speaking out about the decision of the Justice Department to drop its case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, wrote: “I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office…(The dismissal order is) inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear of favor…It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent…I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.”

Recall the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan said it had “concrete evidence” that Adams is a crook. He was indicted last year on five counts of bribery, fraud, and solicitation of illegal foreign campaign donations. But the Trump regime demanded that Sassoon kill the case for political reasons – if Adams was let off the hook, he’d show his gratitude by cooperating with Trump’s immigration crackdown.

It’s not as if Sassoon and Scotten are wide-eyed lefties. Sassoon, a rising star in conservative legal circles, clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, and Scotten clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts after winning two Bronze Stars in the Special Forces. And they’ve drawn support from 900 former New York prosecutors who’ve signed an open letter saluting their courage: “You have responded to ethical challenges, of a type no public servant should ever be forced to confront, with principle and conviction.”

Unfortunately,  I question whether such laudable acts of patriotism will put this nation on the road to recovery. Sassoon, Scotten, and the others will be simply replaced by complicit lackeys, but there’s always the hope their vocal dissents will inspire many more people, inside and outside government, to speak out until their sum total becomes a collective roar.

Now let me tell you a story about Walter Shaub.

Back in 2017, he led the federal Office of Government Ethics. He quit only six months after Trump’s Inaugural, which is understandable, because running an ethics office during a MAGA administration was surely a preposterous proposition, like wielding a mop in a toxic waste dump. I interviewed Shaub after his exit; he said: “I felt that staying on the job would make me complicit. If I stayed, I feared that I would be window dressing for corruption.”

The problem, of course, was that his act of conscience had all the impact of a pebble dropped a pond. The few who publicly resigned were simply replaced by complicit cogs. It’s the same dilemma now. If every government official with even a scintilla of self-respect were to quit in protest, the Putin-Musk-Trump regime would just fill those slots with hacks who’d keep the train hurtling down the tracks. As Bret Stephens, the conservative anti-Trump columnist, lamented the other day in an online chat, referring to Danielle Sassoon, “I’m sure her family is kvelling (proud). The problem for the rest of us is that if we have another three years and 11 months of this, there won’t be a rule of law left in the United States.”

He got that right.

But it’s clear by now that the seeds of rebellion can’t be planted on the inside. An anti-totalitarian grassroots movement can only be harvested from the outside. As exhausted as I am by the electorate’s detestable (but narrow) endorsement of vengeance and ignorance, and as tempting as it may be to take refuge in Netflix binges for the foreseeable future, my fervent hope is that the small acts of conscience from the likes of Sassoon and her colleagues will inspire many others, that these nascent trickles of protest will build to a mighty flood.

It’s the only way.

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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 was blissfully surfing through YouTube the other night when, alas, I chanced upon the face that buzz-killed my bid for escape.

Mitch McConnell, whose craven Senate machinations nudged us, goosestep by goosestep, toward our fascist future, was featured last week on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” and I felt compelled to click on the interview, to view it much the way we rubberneck car accidents – except for the fact that, this time, we’re the ones who’ve been totaled for the junkyard.

McConnell told Leslie Stahl he’s oh so very concerned about the global spread of autocracy: “This is a huge threat, a fight between the autocrats and the democracies, and when it comes to the democratic world, only one country can lead. That’s us.”

Does this hack even hear what he’s saying? This is the same guy who has put us on a glide path to autocracy.

He furrowed his brow on “60 Minutes” and tut-tutted that it’s wrong for us to cozy up to foreign thugs (“it’s dangerous to assume that by speaking to autocrats, they will somehow treat you better”), and he said it’s wrong to slap tariffs on our allies’ products (“It will drive up the cost of everything…it’ll be paid for by American consumers”), and he said it’s wrong to put nutcase quacks in charge of our life-and-death agencies (“vaccines are critically important to health, to having normal lives”). But he’s the big reason we’re stuck with those wrongs – not that he would ever acknowledge it. Wringing an ounce of regret from McConnell is like trying to wrestle an eel.

As the Senate Republican boss in 2021, McConnell led the crusade to acquit Trump during his Jan. 6 insurrection trial. Had he and his GOP minions voted to convict, Trump would’ve been barred from seeking the presidency in 2024 (Article 1 Section 3 of the Constitution specifies “disqualification to hold and enjoy any office”). McConnell’s fallback was to kick the can to the courts – “We have a criminal justice system in this country” – but it turns out there was a hitch, a Catch-22 worthy of Joseph Heller:

He had already rigged the criminal justice system to fail, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court he’d crafted.

He stonewalled Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland for a year, refusing to even schedule a hearing, thus paving the way for MAGA nominee Neil Gorsuch in 2017. Then he rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination with lightning speed in 2020. The result: A MAGA doormat court, which last year decreed that a president can basically do whatever the hell he wants.

If you were wondering, McConnell has no regrets about what he did: “I feel fine about it.” And even though he still says that Trump’s insurrection was wrong and that Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons were wrong, “What happened in the past is irrelevant to me.”

That’s easy for him to say. He’s still shuffling around the Senate (when he’s not falling), his mind cleansed of anything that resembles a conscience. But past and present have collided and we’re fated to live with the wreckage. Thanks to McConnell’s servitude in Impeachment II, and his crafting of the MAGA high court, Trump has been freed up to launch his all-out assault on the judiciary – the last institution that’s been willing, these last few weeks, to throw sand in the gears of his fascist bulldozer.

I oscillate, as well, between optimism and pessimism. It’s heartening that a string of federal judges have blocked Trump’s attempts to freeze appropriated spending on federal grants and loans, dismantle the U.S. Agency on International Development, ban birthright citizenship (which is guaranteed in the Constitution), fire the head of the office that protects whistleblowers, and give Elon Musk full access to the Treasury Department’s financial data on millions of Americans. But the grinding sound you’re hearing are those judicial pillars tottering on their plinths. How long can they hold out? What happens to the rule of law if or when Der Leader decides to ignore all the rulings that stand in his way?

McConnell seems unperturbed about that; in fact, he told “60 Minutes” that he’s still cool with Trump’s agenda because “I’m a Republican,” a word that has been rendered worthless.

I’ll tell you a story about when the word meant something. Flash back with me to 1985, when McConnell was a newly elected lawmaker. He reportedly stood at the podium in a Washington ballroom and told this joke: “I read about a Paris newspaper that conducted a major survey and asked French men what they did after making love. The results were indeed startling. Ten percent said they made love again. Fifteen percent smoked a cigarette. And 75 percent said they went home to their wives.”

From pro-family conservative to water boy for a serial adulterer/predator, Mitch’s journey to the heart of darkness is now complete. And we’re the collateral damage.

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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]

Punxsutawney Phil popped his head from his hidey-hole last weekend and prophesied four years of fascism here in the Turd Reich. Millions of Americans are rightly terrified. Some have even emailed me to ask why I’m not sounding the alarm the way I used to, back when I inveighed against Trump as many as five times a week.

My typical response: For eight long years, I tried. Hundreds of times I tried. So many of my political journalism colleagues tried. But what good did it do? In the land of the willfully blind, what’s the use of being clear eyed?

Did I try hard enough? Did I do my part? You be the judge.

“We can’t become so numb to his demagoguery that we can’t recognize the clear and present danger he poses to our democratic values.” (Oct. 2016)

“He has no respect for the peaceful transition of power, in part because he is ruled by his vile temperament and his vengeful impulses; in part because he has no clue about the responsible exercise of power. Shame on us if we take this as normal.” (Oct. 2016)

“An authoritarian sensibility, a strongman cult, a systematic breakdown of our democratic institutions…Yes, it can indeed happen here. That future is down the dark path at the fork in the road. If we take it, we own it.” (Nov. 2016)

“The most dangerous thing that this intemperate, unqualified man-child could possibly do is precisely what he continues to do – alienate the people whose job is to protect our national security.” (Jan. 2017)

“Trump is a clear and present danger to our national security.” (Dec. 2018)

“A demagogue who plunders America’s democratic institutions and aspires to role-model Russian despotism, a stoker of violence, a sociopathic liar who has dodged accountability his whole life…Strip away everything else about the guy, if that were even possible at this point, and his dearth of empathy and decency is more than enough to render him unfit for more power.” (Nov. 2020)

“It’s not uncommon for democracies to be fatally undermined from within – Germany in the early ‘30s, Turkey and Hungary more recently – and we can’t afford to flatter ourselves with the delusion that we’re simply destined to be different.” (Feb. 2021)

“It would be existentially dangerous to deliver the presidency to a 78-year-old whose brain has melted to the consistency of guacamole. He should have medical care, not the nuclear codes.” (Oct. 2024)

One particular dude, way back in 1988, warned in a radio address that it would be nuts to threaten tariffs and engage in economic warfare against our friends. He called it “a cheap form of nationalism…Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies; they are our allies. We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends – weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world – all while cynically waving the American flag.”

Thank you, Ronald Reagan. (In today’s MAGA GOP, he’d finish dead last in the Iowa caucuses.)

I’m not the proverbial smartest guy in the room; anyone with eyes and ears and functioning cognition understood the metastasizing MAGA threat prior to the ‘24 balloting, and knew what indeed would happen if the criminal and his conspirators were coronated. But mass denial and willful ignorance won the day and now it’s happening. Now here we are – fated to live as hostages, not citizens – our most treasured financial information having already been stolen.

Fascism in this era is not cattle cars en route to extermination camps. Timothy Snyder, the esteemed scholar of fascism, describes the American version – the digital coup – already in progress:

“A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives…They gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their supreme leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments…In the third decade of the 20th century, power is more digital than physical.”

The big question (now that it’s too late) is how we live with all this, how we cope, and (ideally) how we resist. We of course can entertain ourselves with all manner of transitory distractions – How ‘Bout Dem Eagles, West Wing reruns, sublime sunsets, YouTube videos of ocean surf – but, ultimately, unless the flattened Democrats get off their rears, and unless there’s a critical mass of grassroots pushback (a topic for another day), this nation that we’ve loved will be irrevocably shattered.

We will be Russia and Turkey, leaving us Hungary for more.

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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 at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]