Good News in a Bad Week

One of my happiest memories as a journalist is traveling with John McCain on “The Straight Talk Express” during the 2000 Republican primaries. McCain let a half dozen reporters ride around with him all day on a small bus. As we crossed rural New Hampshire and later South Carolina, we could ask him anything, and he answered with brutal honesty.

I thought of this the other day when Trump went after one of my Straight Talk seat mates, Jonathan Karl of ABC News. Karl has done a good job pressing Trump about championing free speech in his Inaugural Address, but now saying that it doesn’t extend to his critics. When Trump endorsed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s outrageous claim that “hate speech”—that is, anything critical of Trump—isn’t protected by the First Amendment, Karl asked him about it. Trump said:

“You have a lot of hate in your heart and maybe they’ll have to go after you.”

This struck me as yet more confirmation that this country is no longer in danger of transforming into an authoritarian state, but has now become one, with more bad news ahead. It reminded me of McCain’s line, “Sometimes it’s darkest just before it’s pitch black.”

McCain got a laugh every time with that, but it was a set-up for a surprisingly sunny take on why, if he was elected, things would get better. I’m a thousand miles from sunny now, mostly because we have more than a thousand days before this monster leaves office. (And leave he will, even if he wants to stay). But I’m beginning to feel that we’ll walk through this storm with our heads held high.

Why? Because this was the week when the worse things got, the easier it was to see a few rays poking through the clouds.

On Sunday, Stephen Miller, speaking at Charlie Kirk’s jam-packed Phoenix funeral/rally, said: “The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot stand my strength.” In other words, the storm is coming, which just happens to be the title of a speech that Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, gave in 1932 when he used the killing of a young Nazi named Horst Wessel by Communists to propel Hitler to power. “The Horst Wessel Song” became the Nazi anthem.

Miller gives new meaning to the Yiddish phrase shanda for the goyim, a Jew whose shameful behavior makes all Jews look bad to non-Jews. He said that anyone who calls Trump a fascist will be investigated and possibly prosecuted, only to find that his repeated use of the word in reference to his enemies was everywhere on social media.

It was gratifying to see Miller himself get shamed in Phoenix by none other than Erika Kirk, whose moving and historically important expression of forgiveness for her husband’s killer—in the spirit of Pope John Paul II forgiving his assailant in 1983—dissipated much of MAGA’s pent-up fury for revenge.

“I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do,” Erika Kirk said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”

The president spoke next, and he said, “I am sorry, Erika. He [Charlie Kirk] did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.”

Classy eulogy, Mr. President. It’s not that hate had no place in State Farm Stadium, but blaming Democrats and the trans community for Kirk’s assassination just isn’t working. While Trump doesn’t have a clue who Horst Wessel was, he and Miller had hoped Kirk’s martyrdom would become a permanent hate delivery system. Thanks in part to Erika Kirk, that does not appear to be underway. Kirk’s memory will power rightwing activism, especially on campus, and purges of Kirk critics will continue for a little while. But longterm, any time someone uses the memory of Charlie Kirk to despise rather than just disagree, someone else is sure to trump local Trumpsters by invoking his widow.

This welcome turn of events came in the wake of what may some day be seen as the most consequential foreign trip of the Trump presidency. King Charles, recognizing that Trump has long been a sucker for royalty, rolled out the red carpet for him. But the ailing king had an agenda: To turn Trump around on Ukraine after he kissed Vladimir Putin’s ass in Alaska. I’ve always liked Charles, who has a social and environmental conscience and was right in much of his criticism of modern architecture. Now he has cancer, and sees it as his role to explain to Trump the elementary history of how England and the U.S, stood strong together against aggression in World War II. The king succeeded in his mission and Trump is now tilting against Russia; officials on all sides are crediting Charles with a diplomatic tour de force.

I know, I know. Mad King Donald is way crazier than Charles’ great, great, great, great grandfather, Mad King George III, and Trump can easily flip-flop. But if he does, Charles, as long as he’s alive, can be counted on to do his duty and invite Trump back for more royal stroking. God Save the King!

Back across the pond, the week started off badly on Monday with Trump’s batshit crazy press conference with RFK Jr., in which both dangerous jerks pretended to be doctors. But if they hoped to convince pregnant woman to avoid Tylenol, they failed. Even MAGA mamas will listen to their physicians.

On Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air and delivered an inspiring rebuke to Trump’s attempts to silence him. More than 30 million Americans watched, either live or on social media and YouTube, a huge number. The Trump stooges at Sinclair and Nextstar didn’t carry Kimmel, and it seemed for a couple of days that his fate was still up in the air. But then these rightwing affiliates relented, a big victory for free speech.

My guess is this happened for two reasons. First, Disney/ABC was holding more cards than anyone realized. The repugnant wannabe censor Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, infamously told affiliates, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Disney CEO Bob Iger said essentially the same thing to them, though it wasn’t offensive because he doesn’t work for the government: “Nice Monday Night Football we let you air in your markets. Pity if something should happen to it.”

The second reason is that Iger, whose wife Willow Bay is a journalist and dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication, was afraid of being blamed for America’s slide toward censorship. A longtime benefactor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iger got called out publicly by his mentor, Michael Eisner, and basically everyone else he respects. Did he want to tell his grandchildren that he helped kill free expression? So he reversed course. This will have the effect of undercutting all of Trump’s other assaults on the media. Trump will continue to threaten and sue networks and news organizations, but it won’t be nearly as scary.

Also on Tuesday, Trump brought his clown act the United Nations, where he told delegates and fellow heads of state, “Your countries are going to hell.” This was interpreted in some quarters as a threat to the global order but in truth was actually just more unhinged bloviating from an American president who has long since ceased being the leader of the free world. The depressing speech has already been forgotten, except for the hissy fit Trump threw over the stopped escalator and malfunctioning teleprompter, both of which were the fault of White House employees.

On Wednesday, we found out that not only had Border Czar Tom Homan taken $50,000 in cash in a CAVA bag from undercover FBI agents during the transition, but he kept the money. In any other administration, Homan would already be gone. In this one, he’ll stay, which on one level is reprehensible. The silver lining is that it makes a joke of his argument that immigrants should be ripped from their families for overstaying their visas or receiving a couple of traffic tickets. Homan’s hypocrisy will handcuff him on TV as he tries to rationalize ICE cruelties.

On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted on felony charges of making a false statement to Congress. This was a sickening abuse of power. Trump moved from threats of retaliation to directly ordering an indictment, as only despots do. Even Andrew McCarthy, a retired rightwing judge who wrote a book critical of the Russiagate story, told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that Comey didn’t lie to Ted Cruz and the case should be thrown out.

I argued on Harry Litman’s podcast, Talking Feds, that Trump’s rank corruption of the Justice Department closely resembles the abuse of power that forced Richard Nixon to resign in 1974. But I don’t think we have “crossed the Rubicon,” as some have suggested. As bad as things are at the now-dysfunctional DOJ—so bad that the FBI may not be able to connect the dots on the next terrorist attack—none of it is irreversible. After Watergate, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter moved quickly to restore the integrity of the department and a Democratic president can do the same in 2029. In the meantime, if Democrats win the House next year, they should impeach Trump in early 2027 and try him in the Senate even if he’d likely win acquittal again. His victory in 2024 does not remove the need for some sense of constitutional accountability. The 2019 and 2021 impeachments were not futile exercises; they put down historical markers establishing that Trump’s behavior is unAmerican. The next impeachment would do the same.

In the short term, as Trump starts indicting others who have done nothing wrong, he should be forced to explain why he isn’t going after the treasonous criminals who stole the election from him in 2020. I thought he wanted to “stop the steal.”

My sense is that Trump is headed toward choppy political waters, and not just because he will mismanage the government shutdown, as I argued in The New York Times. The next “No Kings” rally will take place on October 18 at hundreds of sites around the country. This will likely be larger than the one on June 14, which was the biggest one-day protest in U.S. history. A storm may be coming, Stephen Miller. But it’s not the one you had in mind.