Election night is magic for me. The TV ads and campaign hoopla have vanished. One side has won; the other hasn’t. The truth alone abides. 

But only the loser can confirm it. It takes the concession speech, delivered on live television, to make it real for the side that fell short. 

I will never forget sitting with my dad on my first election night. I felt his sympathy for New York Governor Averell Harriman as he conceded defeat to Nelson Rockefeller in 1958. All these years later, I recall his sympathy for that old-money (compared to Rockefeller) gentleman. 

That is why Donald Trump stands before us as a thief. It’s not all those old carny tricks—the Trump sneakers, the Trump University tuition, the failed Atlantic City casinos, or the bills never paid—it’s his denial to the American voter of an honest accounting of his 2020 presidential loss and the Capitol riot he torched on January 6, 2021. 

Today, my latest book, Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters, is being published. Among its chapters is No. 9, Know When to Concede. 

One of Bobby Kennedy’s gifts was the moral ability to accept defeat, which he did in the 1968 Oregon Presidential primary, a week before his assassination.  

Here is that chapter and with it Bobby’s lesson:  

Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 presidential election. He refused to halt the January 6 “Stop the Steal” attack on the US Capitol. He refused to attend the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021.  

This may have been Trump’s worst crime against the American constitutional system. It definitely gets to the heart of it. The honest transfer of presidential authority is one of this country’s highest traditions. American citizens are proud to have elections that are carried out honestly, and proud to have this transfer of power seen by the world. I think of all the concession speeches in my life: Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore (after the long recount), John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. In his selfish interest, Donald Trump chose to undercut that tradition. 

Here’s a rule. Don’t run for office if you’re incapable of telling the truth about the results. Again, Bobby Kennedy offers the perfect model. 

Weeks before his death, Robert Kennedy could already see himself losing the Oregon presidential primary. The strongest reason had been his own delay in entering the race. Eugene McCarthy offered his anti–Vietnam War challenge in November 1967. Bobby Kennedy had waited until March. He could see himself about to be punished by Oregon’s antiwar Democrats.  

I recall watching Roger Mudd of CBS News interview Kennedy in an airport. When the newsman asked him if it bothered him that so many college students had stuck with McCarthy, the look on his face told us the answer. Boston Globe reporter Robert Healy said that really “gnawed” at Bobby. 

Another problem, close to home, was his lack of a gifted campaign manager, someone whose work would match what he himself had done for his brother Jack in 1960. It meant that his campaign was unable to change direction quickly as it needed to in Oregon. 

But on some issues, Bobby didn’t want to change course. “This just may not be my time,” he admitted. He was doing what he wanted to be doing. He was talking about the people in the cities and about their problems. Some of his advisors told him that the problems of the cities were remote to the voters of Oregon and might cost him votes in the primary if he did not change.  

Just a week before his death, he lost the Oregon presidential primary. It was the first time Bobby had lost an election, either as Jack Kennedy’s campaign manager or as a candidate himself. 

Columnist Jules Witcover described him “in his shirtsleeves, tie off but still wearing the PT-109 tie clasp that had been the symbol of Kennedy political invincibility. He had a heavily watered-down drink in his hand, and he was in a quiet, reflective mood—not bitter, not shocked, not even transparently disappointed, just resigned.” 

Bobby said that he could sense days before the Oregon primary that he was in trouble when he failed to get a responsive reaction from Portland factory workers. He could tell, he said, that they weren’t tuned in, that he wasn’t communicating with them. He asked aides where he had run well and where poorly, and he took the information much like the campaign manager he once was. One reporter asked him if he thought Oregon had hurt him, and it made him laugh. “It certainly wasn’t one of the more helpful developments of the day,” he said. 

But he refused to blame his campaigners. “If I’d won it, it would have been my victory, and I’ve lost it and it’s my defeat. I sometimes wonder if I’ve correctly sensed the mood of America. I think I have. But maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe the people don’t want things changed. I do better with people who have problems.” 

Pat Buchanan, then a campaign researcher for Richard Nixon, was impressed by the way Kennedy absorbed the shock of losing. “His graciousness in conceding defeat and congratulating Gene McCarthy was impressive. This is the first time I’d seen Bobby in person. He could not have shown himself better in victory than he did in defeat that night.” 

Bobby told Jack Newfield. “If that happens, I will just go back to the Senate, and say what I believe, and not try again in ’72. Somebody has to speak up for the Negroes, and Indians, and Mexicans, and poor whites. Maybe that’s what I do best. Maybe my personality just isn’t built for this. . . . The issues are more important than me now.”  

Looking forward to the California primary, Bobby raised the stakes. 

First, he agreed to meet Gene McCarthy in a nationally televised debate. “I’m not in much of a position now to say he’s not a serious candidate. Hell, if he’s not a serious candidate after tonight, then I’m not a candidate at all.” 

Second, he promised to end his campaign if he lost in California.  

The honest acceptance of his loss in Oregon showed that Kennedy wasn’t the “ruthless” figure he’d been called. 

Bobby Kennedy matters because he acknowledged defeat. That is the enduring reality here. If the loser in an election refuses to offer a public, televised concession speech, he is sharing his denial with his followers. That’s what Donald Trump, the loser of the 2020 presidential election, told his MAGA crowd as they headed to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

I have long taken pride that we as Americans participate in a vibrant democracy—living in a country where those who lose elections give a public accounting of their loss. They don’t blame the count; they don’t blame the democratic system itself 

I recall sitting in our basement rec room with Dad watching the 1958 midterm election results. New York Governor Averell Harriman came on to offer his concession speech. He’d just lost the race to Nelson Rockefeller. My father felt an immediate emotional connection with the governor’s loss. As a middle-class guy, he could nonetheless identify personally with the moment the fabulously wealthy Harriman was facing. 

That was my introduction to watching national election results and to truly understanding our democracy. For years, through election after election, I have looked forward to the concession speech. It is a bittersweet time for those who fought hard in a campaign, especially for the candidate who just learned he or she had lost. 

But it is a clear sign that the campaign is over. All the TV ads and bumper stickers have done their business. Now we saw that the people have had their say. The winner has been decided. The loser has just told us so. It brings a crackling reality to the whole exercise. Our great democracy has won again. 

I especially took pride in our free and open democratic system when I served in the Peace Corps. As I hitchhiked my way up through East Africa, I saw young democracies where the losers would predictably claim that the election had been stolen. I have also personally witnessed a good number of elections in my career. I lost a primary myself running for Congress in 1974. I saw my first boss, Senator Frank Moss, lose his reelection bid in Utah two years later, and in 1980, I watched my boss, Jimmy Carter, go down. In both those cases, the losing candidates, my candidates, gave public concession speeches. 

Yet on January 6, we saw the same cheap charges—“Stop the Steal”—being thrown here in the United States. 

President Trump, defeated in the November 2020 election by seven million votes in the popular count, told a crowd of unruly supporters to head to the Capitol. Once there, they tore through the doors and left a trail of mayhem. It took the combined U.S. Capitol and Metropolitan Police to stop them before they could bring real harm or worse to members of Congress and to Trump’s own vice president. 

This piece is adapted from Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters by Chris Matthews. Copyright © 2025 by Christopher J. Matthews.  Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The post What Senator Robert F. Kennedy Could Teach Donald Trump  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Watch the president closely. 

He is using television as pedagogy. Trump uses television to train his troops, educate, and arm MAGA. This differs greatly from Franklin D. Roosevelt mastering radio or John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan commanding television. This is Trump turning video—whether it appears on TikTok or cable—into behavioral training.

Faced with defeat in 2020 by 7 million votes in the popular count and 302 to 232 in the electoral college, Trump declared himself the victor. Without giving his arithmetic a second thought, MAGA echoed him. Its forces joined him at the Ellipse, demanding that Congress “Stop the Steal.” 

The MAGA troops cannot say which states were incorrectly counted in 2020. They don’t need to. 

They saw Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania go for Joe Biden, the same pivotal states that went for Trump in 2016.

But they accepted, nonetheless, the loser’s cry of triumph. They trooped to the Capitol and tried to stop the electoral count. Trump said he won. MAGA, hungry for blood, acted on his words. 

What Trump tells them on television, MAGA eats whole—aping his behavior. His ownership of the Republican Party empowered each of his appointed Cabinet nominees to be approved by Congress, despite any private misgivings about the likes of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel. By Hollywood standards, every Trump nominee won an Oscar, no matter how unqualified or dreadful. 

This is the power of MAGA. It hears Trump speak on TV. It echoes his every word.

Why? Trump never stops using television to train his millions of supporters, telling them what to think and how to act. 

And he does it before our eyes on television. Again, we watch Trump on TV. MAGA does it to take instruction.

This winter, the president and vice president unleashed a brutal humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

They did it in the Oval Office before the world. The smackdown was, as Trump was delighted to tell us, “Great Television.” 

They bullied the courageous Ukrainian leader and chased him from the White House, canceling follow-up meetings and sending the delegation back to Kyiv. With JD Vance as his backup, Trump treated Zelensky the way they wanted MAGA to see him treated.

Again, the Oval Office show of contempt was an object lesson. The MAGA troops saw how their hero treated Zelensky. MAGA now has it in their head precisely how to place an ugly regard not just on Zelensky but on Ukraine itself. 

The performance was remarkable, even by Trump’s standards. He was showing his Republican troops how brutally to behave, how a bully can take down the little guy on the beach.

And what a turn it made from Republican history.

In 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower left his post as Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to run for president. He aimed to ensure the early success of the greatest bulwark of defense against an aggressive Russia. 

In 2025, Donald Trump showed Republicans how to march alongside Josef Stalin’s Kremlin successor.

Two weeks ago, more “Great Television.”

The president went before the Congress and the American people in February. One of his goals was to soften up Social Security for the kill. Trump spoke of the 4.6 million people aged 100 to 109 getting retirement benefits, the 3.6 million aged 110 to 119 receiving monthly checks, and the 1.3 million aged 150 to 159. 

And, through every decade of Trump’s contempt for the New Deal program, Republicans clapped and cheered as if it were all true. 

This is how Trump does it. He performs these acts so MAGA will know how to act. He performs episode upon episode of Sesame Street programs, all designed to teach the MAGA troops what to believe and what to ridicule.

He matches such claims when he loses an election. 

He humiliates Zelensky, and his MAGA people learn how easy it is to mock Moscow’s victim. He makes Social Security look ridiculous and makes even Democratic retirees worry a bit more about their futures.

He is forever drilling his troops and doing it right before us.

It’s happening right there on the TV screen in front of us. Yes, Trump wants to abolish the Education Department. But he wants one of his very own to-school MAGA. 

As Trump himself decrees, it’s “Great television.”

The post What Trump Means by “Great Television!” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Moose.

That’s the self-named bully who arrived at our schoolyard in the late 1950s. Worse than the bully himself were his handlers, his posse. Merely to ask the question “Who’s Moose?” was to have yourself hauled before him to be bullied and humiliated.

His henchmen cheered Moose’s provocations and derided all who dared challenge or ignore him. 

I found his gang to be especially loathsome, toadies all. 

Today, such henchmen circle the U.S. Capitol. The MAGA types warn any senator who dares to insist on their right to challenge Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. To them, the Senate’s “Advice and Consent” role, enshrined in Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, must yield whenever Trump demands it.

The Senate must now decide whether to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

With three Republican senators on record opposing Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary—Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Murkowski—it now appears that Senator Bill Cassidy would be sufficient to topple the nomination. McConnell, a polio survivor who spent time in his youth at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Warm Springs to ease his ailments, seems to have no truck for the Kennedy scion’s conspiracy theories.

A successful gastroenterologist by training and one of only seven Republican senators to vote guilty at Trump’s second Senate trial, Cassidy said he is “struggling” with the Kennedy selection to run HHS. He questioned Kennedy repeatedly last Thursday on his long history of opposing vaccines and reportedly spent much of this past weekend on the phone with the environmental attorney turned MAGA champion

“Can I trust that is now in the past?” Cassidy asked about vaccine opposition

Kennedy’s answer is to question why the medical community hasn’t been able to explain the steady rise in autism itself. 

Cassidy’s vote to reject or accept the Kennedy nomination will likely prove decisive. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate. With all Democrats expected to oppose RFK, Jr., the GOP will be short of the 50 “aye” votes to confirm along with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President J.D. Vance.

MAGA groups backing Trump in the fight are treating the Louisiana senator as a GOP renegade. They promise to challenge him in the 2026 Republican primary, something he probably would have faced anyway for his impeachment vote.

Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the slain president, former ambassador to Japan and Australia, who generally avoids politics, has attacked her cousin, RFK, Jr. She said they grew up together and views him as a “predator,” accusing him of dragging other family members into illegal drug use. She says Bobby is especially unfit for the HHS secretary position. She says he is “addicted” to grabbing “attention and power” and said he sadistically put mice in blenders to feed to his falcons and other birds of prey

While Kennedy eschews most politics, backing Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid helped doom Hillary Clinton’s.

Her endorsement won’t sway Republicans like Cassidy, but it puts in stark relief how controversial this nomination has become. It’s a battle between the bully, our nation’s Moose, Donald Trump, and his MAGA henchmen versus whoever stands up against this nomination.

Senator Cassidy should be applauded for his commitment to the values of good medicine and the constitutional role of the U.S. Senate in its “Advice and Consent.” He’s even given the nominee an exit ramp from his conspiratorial views.  Cassidy has said if Kennedy would come out and said vaccines are safe, that they do not cause autism, it would “have an incredible impact.” Without it, the Louisiana senator has said, “I got to figure that out for my vote.” 

I grew up reading Alan Drury’s 1959 bestselling novel Advise and Consent, which describes the controversy surrounding the Senate confirmation of a secretary of state nominee accused of having been a Communist Party member. I often watch the 1962 film, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, and a young Betty White as a U.S. Senator from Georgia. Advise and Consent is perhaps the best book on the Senate’s traditional role in such matters. 

Drury’s novel taught me at a young age the extraordinary courage it takes for a single senator to break with his party and the brutal pressures used to keep him from doing so.

And I remember reading something Robert Kennedy Jr.’s father read on the subject. It came in a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Always do what you are afraid to do,”

It was a line Senator Kennedy marked himself in the Emerson book. 

With the greatest of humility, I advise Senator Cassidy to follow the senior Kennedy who dared challenge President Lyndon Johnson and many in his party on its prosecution of the Vietnam War and to reject the Kennedy who had been pushing “anti-vax” conspiracy theories. He’s not inclined to take advice from someone who worked for Tip O’Neill and Jimmy Carter, but he does know the Hippocratic oath that physicians adhere to and its injunction to do no harm. Can anyone doubt that Kennedy risks great harm to the nation his father so loved?

The post Bill Cassidy, A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You appeared first on Washington Monthly.

How does a country keep its electoral institutions and yet lose its democratic spirit?

I’ve been wondering about this in recent months. How does America, the greatest of democracies, become a Hungary?

We are watching that process right now.

When Jack Kennedy was killed, Jimmy Breslin skipped the parade and wrote instead about the gravediggers. Now we see an American president who is out in plain daylight burying the republic itself.

First, the U.S. Senate failed to assert its obligation to reject cabinet nominations. Where are the few Republicans who could hold the fort against the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel? Aren’t there four who dare?

Next are the pardons of those who Trump has christened as the “J-Six Patriots.”

On January 6, 2021, hundreds of people descended on the U.S. Capitol to crush a constitutional transition of power. A police officer suffered a stroke and died the next day. Two others, Jeffrey Smith and Howard Liebengood, commit suicide in the days thereafter.

I can imagine why. As a U.S. Capitol Police officer a half-century ago, I remember the many fellow officers who commuted from as far as West Virginia. Many were ex-military, often Military Police, “double-dippers” who had served decades as enlisted men, and they were all men.

They were working people, In other words, like those who attacked the U.S. capitol on January 6. They could see themselves in the faces of those charging the building’s outer doors, see the hatred being aimed at those who held the line. For months, I have been talking about the anguish that the Capitol Police felt on January 6. There they stood, fighting for the country’s capitol, the center of its democracy, against the angry faces of their neighbors.

There is no way to attempt an even-handedness on that historic day. Or now, in the days after President Trump, who directed the mob, has granted even the most violent among them pardons.

In 1971, I served as a Capitol Policeman. A decade later, I was the chief of staff to Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. I knew what it was like to check the doors as a Capitol cop and to have a prime office only a few feet from the Speaker’s Door, where the attackers fought their way viciously past police for further bedlam into the House chamber itself.

Both of my jobs, cop and consigliere, were honorable. Just home from the Peace Corps in Africa, my police gig was a patronage appointment under the old system. I got to work with those country boys from the outskirts of D.C. and listened to them during breaks. (Recall that George Wallace was running a strong campaign in suburban Maryland when he was shot a year later.) It was in the heat and heart of the Vietnam era, with an intense rivalry between town and gown, even between father and son.

I remember one West Virginia country boy who pulled me aside to explain something to the college grad about the working guys.

“Do you know, Chris, why the little man loves his country?”

I hesitated to let him answer.

“It’s because it’s all he’s got!”

In a long career of treasuring certain words, these are some that I hold closest. The “little man” doesn’t have money, a big home, or kids with a four-year degree

He does have his country and loves it all the more for his lack of other possessions.

On January 6, 2021, President Trump sent his mob to the Capitol, careening through its doors and windows to prevent the safe transfer of presidential authority from one American to the next.

In so doing, they sent men to their graves for having to choose between the country they love and the familiar, menacing faces of their own neighbors.

The post Before I Was a Politico and a Journalist, I Was a U.S. Capitol Police Officer appeared first on Washington Monthly.

William Wordsworth wrote famously that the “child is father of the man.” Nothing is so strong, the poet said, in who we become as our own experiences in youth. 

So, how did the young Jimmy Carter become the man who is being honored this week? Is his youth in the Jim Crow South at the root of his pro-civil rights political record? 

“It’s still a part of me, the way it was back in the twenties and thirties,” Carter told me on Hardball. “All my playmates were black kids. They were the kids who I worked with in the field, went hunting and fishing with, wrestled with and tried to outrun.” 

Carter also understood the deference, so often called privilege, that he was afforded and his friends were not.   

“I knew that when we jumped on a train, my black playmates would sit in a different boxcar from me. And when we walked down the street holding hands.  But when we got to the movie house, though, I knew that my friends had to go up to the third floor and sit on dirty little dinky hard seats, and I sat on the first floor, you know, on a soft seat.”   

“And so we would get back on the train and go back home.  And I knew they went to different schools and a different church. I still didn’t realize that they were treating me differently. In fact, most of the time, they didn’t because the one who was dominant was the one that caught the biggest fish or would kill the most squirrels or ran the fastest or jumped the highest.” 

But as Carter became a teenager, he noticed how things began to change. 

“When I was about fourteen years old, two of my black friends and I were coming out of the field. We got all the way to the barn. And we got to what we called a pasture gate. And when we started to go through the gate, they stood back to let me go first.         

“When I was an adult looking back on it that, their parents must have just told them, ‘You know, it’s time for you all to start Jimmy as a white person.’”  

It was in the U.S. Navy, as a submarine officer, that he realized how the world could change.  

“I had no thought about going into public office when I was young.  When I was six years old, If anybody asked me what I was gonna do when I grew up, I would say, ‘I’m gonna go to the Naval Academy and be a Naval officer.’ And that’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to go to Annapolis.”  

It was in 1948, while Carter was on active duty, that President Harry S. Truman declared that racial segregation would no longer be allowed in the U.S. military.  

Carter was honest about how this affected him, a child of the white South.  

 “I really didn’t see the advantages of doing away with segregation until I was in the submarine force.  

“When I came back from the Navy, of course, I had been living on subs with blacks.”  

But back home in the deep south, he realized racial conditions hadn’t changed. 

“But Plains, Georgia, hadn’t changed that much.  We had boycotts against our business.”  

That was because you wouldn’t join the White Citizens Council?         

“Yeah!  So, one day, I took my pickup truck to the only service station in town, and they refused to put gasoline in my car.  So, I had to get my own gas pump, and we lost a lot of business.”      

“But Georgia eventually changed, primarily because of the influence of the Atlanta Constitution and the examples set by the Atlanta mayors. Georgia didn’t do what Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas did.  We didn’t stand in the schoolhouse door!  We had 200 school boards; I was chairman of one of them.” 

In his 1971 inaugural address, Governor Carter declared for himself and for his state that “the days of racial segregation are over.”  

The post Jimmy Carter’s Segregation Journey appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It is often said that Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency was his finest achievement. I argue it was how this guy from Plains, Georgia, got to the White House in the first place. 

People forget the simple declaration Carter made early in his presidential campaign in 1975, promising the American people he’d never “lie” to them. Decades after his presidency, Carter told me how the American voter reacted to that promise. 

“We had lost Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. We had the Vietnam War. We had been through Watergate,” Carter said to me. “All these things had happened just before I ran. There was a lot of disillusionment. I was a fresh face: peanut farmer from a little town in Plains, Georgia. I think they were looking for something different.”  

It took me a while to pick up on what the former one-term governor of Georgia was selling in those early 1976 Democratic primaries. Unlike his fellow Democrats, Carter wasn’t pushing new programs. His agenda was humbler. It was about fixing what was promised before and had turned up broken—regulations that went too far, agencies that outlived their usefulness. It was what separated him from the Democratic liberals.  

While other Democratic candidates, such as Senators Walter Mondale, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and Representative Morris Udall, were bragging about all they would do, the Georgia governor was showing political humility, something the country was deeply hungry for.  

Instead of traveling with an entourage and staying at high-priced hotels, Carter asked people if he could stay at their homes. One person who noticed this was Ted Sorensen, the former John F. Kennedy aide. “How can you vote against someone,” he asked, “who has slept on your couch?” 

Carter said it was much easier for him to be the maverick running against the Washington liberals, or even Governor George Wallace, in those early days. It’s when he became the Democratic nominee that things got harder. 

 “For me, the general election was much more difficult. I had been running as a somewhat lonely and independent candidate—a peanut farmer and former governor—who was quite removed from the Washington scene. Now I inherited the leadership mantle of the Democratic Party, including all the negative and burdensome trappings.”  

It became more difficult still when he became president. Even then, he tried doing much of the heavy lifting himself.  

I had become one of Carter’s presidential speechwriters in 1979. My most vivid memory was walking through the West Wing in the pre-dawn hours with a speech draft I had spent much of the night trying to get right. I can still recall, even now, the aroma of the coffee already brewing. He was still the farmer, the fellow who got up early to do the job and liked it best when he could do the presidential chores by himself.  

This is how he had run his campaign and tried to run his presidency. It’s how he described it to me in that last taped interview he gave me in my later years anchoring Hardball. At every stage, before, during and after the presidency, it was always Jimmy Carter driving the stagecoach.  

The first thing Carter did in his 1977 inaugural address was offer a personal tribute to the man he had just defeated. “For myself and for our nation,” he said, “I want to thank my predecessor for all he had done to heal our land.”  

Next was the decision to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on inauguration day. Carter said he got the idea from Senator William Proxmire, whom he described to me as a “physical fitness buff.”  

“I told the Secret Service what I was gonna do,” Carter told me with evident pride looking back. “I didn’t ask their permission.” He kept the inaugural walk secret right up ‘til he and Rosalyn had opened the door on the presidential limousine: “I think it broke the ice. It showed that I trusted the American people, that I thought it was time for animosity and hatred in our country’s politics to be over.” 

On his first day as president, Carter took the historic step of pardoning all those who had gone to Canada to avoid the draft: “I just thought it was time to get that bad episode in America’s history out of the way and not have to fight about it again.” He didn’t want to kick Watergate, Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam War itself down the road one more time. 

Then, of course, the 39^th American president went for broke. “Nobody ever asked me, for instance, to try to bring peace between Israel and Egypt,” he said of the historic 1978 Camp David meetings. “I decided to take on the task which nobody asked me to do, of bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, and I was ultimately successful.” Those three men—Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, and Carter—met the test of time. Before those thirteen days at Camp David, there were four wars led by Egypt against Israel—1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Since then, they have upheld that peace treaty forged at Camp David in the fall of 1978. 

As for the Panama Canal Treaty, ratified in 1978, getting it approved by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, Carter argued, was to him “more difficult than getting elected president.” It, too, has endured despite Donald Trump’s rumblings. Holding onto the U.S-built canal could have invited years of Central American terrorism. 

It was yet another case in which Carter avoided future problems. From his surprising 1976 victory to each footstep down Pennsylvania Avenue to the initial act of granting pardons to Vietnam War evaders, to the Camp David Accords, through the Panama Canal Treaty, to this emphasis on human rights with Russia, it was always the farmer from Plains, always accompanied by wife Rosalynn, driving the stagecoach.  

And it was Carter, too, who the American people denied a second term when 52 Americans were taken prisoner when Iranian students overran our embassy in Tehran in 1979.  

I remember when the Shah of Iran visited the Carters in Washington in November 1977. Like the president, the Iranian ruler, and their wives, I smelled the tear gas used to subdue the student protesters that day. The angry students, who had come to the U.S. to escape the Pahlavi tyranny, would not keep their outrage overseas.  

I was at the White House in November 1980 when President Carter told his country the hard truth. “I wish I could tell you when the hostages will be released,” he said country that grim Sunday afternoon. “I can’t.” 

The man from what he called the “dingy little town of Plains” had done a lot as president but not enough.  

“When the hostages were taken, obviously, it was a major crisis for me and for every American as well,” Carter said. “And I was to blame for it because it was up to the president to keep us from having hostages taken, and so it lasted 444 days. I remember very clearly, and there was nothing I could do about it.” 

That was on Monday evening, the day before the 1980 presidential election.  

In a way, he had set the terms himself. “If you kill a hostage, I will attack you militarily.” The Ayatollah had held to that deal, so had Jimmy Carter.  

To Carter, it was always about the hostages coming home, not about what was seen worldwide as a national humiliation. “I felt that if we did attack Iran, even if we bombed a distant place away from the capital, the hostages would immediately been killed.” 

To him, it was always and entirely about getting the hostages home, not the pride of representing the world’s most powerful country.  

Was Carter, in fact, a pacifist?  

“Almost every one of my advisors had suggested that we should attack Iran militarily, but I didn’t want to go to war.” 

Another president—Ronald Reagan?—might have. Clearly, not Jimmy Carter.  

I was on Air Force One the Monday before the election when Walter Cronkite opened the CBS Evening News with the first anniversary of the hostage-taking as the first item on the news. The presidential election was the second.  

The next evening brought the country’s verdict. Carter wanted the 52 hostages returned, and that was not going to happen despite all the humiliation and anger. And Jimmy Carter was not going to start a war over it. Another president might have. He couldn’t.  

“That’s one of the things that I bring up in my bible class every now and then. We worship a prince of peace, not war. “Living at peace,” he insisted, “is a basic human right.” 

“I enjoyed being president. It was a great experience for me, and I am very satisfied with what we did. I wanted a second term, but that was not in the cards.”  

 “There are some things that I wanted to do as president. I wanted to keep our country at peace. I wanted to promote human rights. I wanted to make an orderly business out of our government. I wanted to bring peace to Israel and Egypt.  

 “So, there were things I wanted to do.” 

“And you did those things,” I said. 

 “Yeah!”  

The post The Jimmy Carter Way appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“There needs to be some form of punishment,” Donald Trump can be heard. “For the woman?” I asked in a follow-up. “Yes.”   

This is what I asked the Republican presidential candidate in a March 2016 MSNBC town meeting. The question was about what consequences a woman should face who had an abortion. It was before Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, before he appointed three Supreme Court justices who broke Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling that enshrined a constitutional right to have the procedure, and not long after, he abandoned his position favoring legal abortion.

Again:

“There needs to be some form of punishment,” the presidential candidate answered.

“For the woman?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered.    

My question was asked during a presidential town meeting in Green Bay just before the 2016 Wisconsin Republican primary. My producer, Robert Zelinger, and I were trying to determine the extent of Trump’s newfound pro-life position. His answer reflected a stronger, more punitive stance than the Catholic church’s position, which supports sanctions against the doctors involved but not women. Indeed, the entire thrust of the pro-life cause was to portray women as victims of abortion and only to seek legal redress against those who perform the procedure. See this piece from Americans United for Life on why women should not be prosecuted.

Here’s what’s interesting: Trump never, as far as I know, personally walked back his position. His campaign people issued the usual denial of what he’d told me and the public town meeting, but he never did.

What struck me back in 2016 was Trump’s motivation. At the same time, he was planning to appoint judges to the Supreme Court; he was intent on harming women, not, as he said recently, “protecting” them. He was pursuing what turned out, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, to be deadly harm, as we’ve seen in so many states in the wake of  Dobbs, which has left women with lethal pregnancies scrambling to find medical care in other states.

I have watched this Matthews-Trump interview endless times, especially in battleground states like Pennsylvania, my home state, where I am watching the election returns. It’s a blizzard of my voice. And it became integral to many anti-Trump ads from the Harris-Walz campaign and various SuperPACs. Trump’s pro-punishment position didn’t derail his 2016 bid, of course. And he almost won reelection in 2020, despite it. But the Dobbs decision in 2022 made Democrats believe it could turn the tide in their favor, and they hammered it.Trump clearly angered women who had resented his penal approach, especially those of the boomer generation, who had to endure those years when men were able to engage in sexual relations and, more often than not, shirk any responsibility for the pregnancy they created, leaving a woman to seek an illegal and unsafe procedure or to have the child, often out of wedlock. I suspect this explains part of why women over 65 seem so warm to Harris, at least in early polling. I suspect there was some generational justice at work. Still, as memorable and revealing as Trump’s answer was, it was not enough to stop the Republican nominee from running the map on Election Day 2024.

The post I Asked Trump if Women Should Be Punished for Having an Abortion. He Said, “Yes.” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In John Barth’s short story “The Remobilization of Jacob Horner,” published in Esquire in 1958, a physician explains to the lead character, who suffers from paralysis, that “In life, there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, is a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.” This is the corollary to the old saw that “no man is a hero to his valet.”

Donald Trump has built a comforting, heroic worldview on premises the rest of us might consider horrifying. What makes him a hero in his own mind is bleak for those who consider democracy sacred and a strongman an American blasphemy.

This is how Trump’s brain works: Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican, lost her congressional seat in 2022, the one held by her father, for telling the truth about the January 6 insurrection. Her drubbing makes Trump feel validated in his sense of self. Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican, is rebuked back home for working on a bipartisan border deal that Trump calls a “gift” to President Joe Biden. In Trump’s worldview, now that the deal seems to be dead, he feels validated.

As he cruises to his third Republican nomination for president of the United States, Trump sees confirmation of his greatness everywhere. Sure, there are the 91 felony counts with which to contend and the financial threats to his tarnished brand. But there is also the validation of supporters who refill his campaign coffers in the belief that he alone can fix America. And there is the prospect of returning to the White House where he can be “your retribution.”

Yes, that’s Trump’s worldview.

But there is also another. Two hundred thirteen rioters from the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol have pled guilty to felony charges. Rudolph Giuliani, Time’s 2001 “Person of the Year,” must pay $146 million for libeling a Black mother and daughter who served as Georgia election workers and who “America’s Mayor” falsely accused of stealing votes.

While Trump tells himself that he’s the hero of his own story, the American legal system is working, perhaps too slowly to keep him from returning to office, but it is working. The second highest court in the land, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has rebuffed his preposterous claim of presidential immunity for January 6.

Journalist E. Jean Carroll sued the former president for raping her in a department store dressing room. The civil lawsuit and the jury verdict cost the former president $5 million. Unable to appeal quietly or just accept his losses, Trump libeled Carroll, which put another $83 million on his tab.

Any day now, Trump faces punishment in a New York State fraud case of falsifying his assets and liabilities. That could run the bill up to $370 million. It could also get him banned from business in the Empire State, where he was once seen as synonymous with success. 

Whatever his grandiose sense of self, Trump is not above the law. He is now facing its consequences right out there on Fifth Avenue in front of his eponymous tower. That’s where he bragged he could shoot someone and get elected president. In some sense, he was right. His supporters see each crime as verifying his greatness and confirming his victimhood at the hands of the Deep State, evil women, or the villain du jour.

Trump may have reached high noon on that notorious claim of his. Once the Supreme Court rules on his claim of presidential immunity, he must defend himself against leading the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. That could mean a jail term. While the Court, where he nominated a third of the judges, probably won’t countenance Colorado and other states kicking him off the ballot for the insurrection, giving an ex-president blanket immunity may go too far even for the Roberts Court.

The intriguing aspect of Trump’s rap card is the leading role being played by women. 

For a man who notoriously bragged he could grab women by their private parts because they let you do that when you’re a star, Trump’s future now lies in their hands. First came E. Jean Carroll for assault, and then again for defamation. We await the decision in that fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James and in the Fulton County, Georgia, trial prosecuted by the beleaguered but still-standing district attorney, Fani Willis. This is the case where Trump asked the secretary of state to find him the votes to win.

When the January 6 case resumes, Federal District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan will be foremost in Trump’s mind. 

Another woman who gets under Trump’s wrinkly skin is Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide-de-camp to Trump’s last White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, who has damning testimony to deliver against Trump in the January 6 trial. The young woman, the first in her family to attend college, was present when Trump refused to act as the Capitol was under siege. Her poise and clarity at the House January 6 Committee hearings were mesmerizing, as was her book, Enough. The government couldn’t ask for a better witness than Hutchinson. To Trump, she’s one more traitor of the female persuasion.

The other woman who is unsettling Trump is former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, his appointee to be United Nations ambassador. He lampoons his lone remaining challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination with a festoonery of nicknames like “birdbrain” but can’t seem to rid himself of his one-time diplomat. For Trump, it’s more betrayal, which is what he now also sees from, of all people, Kayleigh McEnany, his former press secretary, whom he bashed as a RINO last month for lavishing insufficient praise on his New Hampshire primary win.

Haley is picking up influential old-school conservative columnists like The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post’s George F. Will, and The New York Times’s Bret Stephens. It’s entirely possible that with backing from equally big-name donors, Haley could be in this race for weeks more, irritating the Mar-a-Lago narcissist and, perhaps, winning a primary somewhere but not getting anywhere near the delegates needed to threaten Trump’s nomination.

But she does threaten his ego like the powerful and principled Carroll, Cheney, and Hutchinson.

In Trump’s world, of course, only Trump is the hero. But he’s not a happy warrior. (Have you ever seen Trump really laugh?) As his niece and familial tormentor, Mary Trump, a psychologist, titled her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. The women are making it harder and harder for Trump to stick to his heroic narrative. Whether the furies can take him down is another question.

The post The Furies Tormenting Donald Trump appeared first on Washington Monthly.

New Hampshire was cold on primary day. Worse yet, it lacked the heated two-party politics that has warmed its “Live Free or Die” soul since 1952.

This year, and perhaps in the future, the GOP was the only side to offer a battleground. The Democrats decided to bypass New Hampshire and open this year with a more racially diverse South Carolina, so no delegates are awarded on the Democratic side. President Joe Biden made it a point not to come here. 

Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips’s effort to garner votes against Biden didn’t amount to much. That meant the only conflict on election day was former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley trying to stop Donald Trump, the national GOP frontrunner. With Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stepping aside before the polling stations opened, Haley was left standing as the last challenger. 

I began my coverage here in New Hampshire last week, hoping that Haley would pull a miracle, the kind this state has long made famous. 

Remember how Eugene McCarthy began the human bonfire of President Lyndon Johnson in 1968? Or is Bill Clinton pulling off that “Comeback Kid” number in 1992? Or Hillary’s upsetting of Senator Barack Obama in 2016?

That’s what I came to New Hampshire for in ’24. I came expecting to see the lady from South Carolina pull down Donald Trump like she did that Confederate Battle Flag from her state capitol in 2015. 

But Haley never did it. She could never rise from the tepid script that chided Trump for overspending rather than denouncing for being a criminal. She could not say he was a walking disaster zone, only that “chaos follows him.” Haley has an interesting story about identity, the Tea Party—of which she was a darling, her time at the U.N., and so on. Her parents did not convert to Christianity like she did. What was that like? She was all over the map on abortion but with little to say that was personal as she aspires to be the first Madam President. She remained enigmatic and two-dimensional when she needed to be fully formed. 

Even when driven from her script at one event by screaming environmental hecklers, she could never resist hitting the “Resume” button.

Sticking to the script killed her. 

It’s not that she didn’t have advantages. Everyone loves an underdog. Plus, she had New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu as her warm-up act, and a great musical playlist floated and rocked in the air at her events. She had the New Hampshire Union-Leader singing her praises. 

But she could never make it happen. There was never that before-and-after moment that elevated her candidacy to something magical. Like Ronald Reagan yelling out, “I paid for this microphone!” or Hillary saying, “That hurts my feelings,” when a news anchor told her the voters didn’t like her. 

Trump, by contrast, could afford to play it safe. He might be in legal jeopardy, but his frontrunner status meant that all he had to do was show up, take it seriously, and not blow it. 

And so, he came to New Hampshire, where he won the primary in 2016, putting him on the path to his first nomination. He led major rallies over the last few days and stayed through the voting instead of taking off for Mar-a-Lago. It was enough.

I suppose it comes down to candidates and their talents. Allan Gregg, a political pollster up in Canada, once told me the trio of rules for political success: 

Motive: Why is this person running for office? What truly moves them? 

Passion: What makes this candidate emotional? 

Spontaneity: How well do they react?

Applying these measures to Trump isn’t hard. He is moved by grievance. He is excited by power. Standing before large audiences or on social media, he is forever ready to titillate.

By such measures, Governor Haley is hard to rate. Her motive for running against Trump isn’t clear. There’s no real ideological divide. She agrees with his policies but says chaos follows him. As she recites a lengthy and obvious retinue of positions—China and spending, bad, aiding Israel. good—it’s hard to locate or calibrate where her emotions might lie. 

But it’s her lack of spontaneity that kills her. She is scripted and remains so, especially since her multiple stumbles on the hot question of the 1864 presidential campaign–slavery. She’s now laser-focused. No interruption drives her from the words that have won her mind and heart. There are moments when she runs for president with all the resolve of an average Virginia state senator debating Governor Glenn Youngkin on school curricula. Then, without warning, she lists the number of nuclear missiles in the Chinese arsenal. I don’t get it. Does she?

But is it more personal than this? Who is she? 

When Ron DeSantis dropped out of the New Hampshire primary this Sunday, she was speechless. 

All she could muster was something about it being now a “two” person race. But what are the questions facing the country? 

She never addressed the primary audience with what was truly driving her. Was it the horror of a second Donald Trump presidency? Or the genuine excitement of there being a President Nikki Haley. There was never a human statement from her, Governor Haley herself, of what this final Republican primary means to her, the voters, and the country. 

In short, I never got the idea that Nikki Haley brought herself into the room with her. 

Trump, for his part, took no chances. 

However weary he may have become on the stump, the Trump organization took no chances in New Hampshire. 

His team blocked out the geography and built big rallies to reach it all. Even Trump let it slip late Monday night that his team was covering each “slice of the state” with a substantial rally.

Just as he did to Pennsylvania in 2016, Trump’s people ensured he got to his voters. And in each “slice,” he told New Hampshire that he, Donald Trump, was there to take the enemy’s fire, to be nailed to the cross for their salvation.

“I am being indicted for you!” 

The Republican presidential nominee will be Trump for the third time. The GOP has never had a triple play like this. The last time was William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic nominee. We will see if President Biden can, once again, bar this wild, loud, and dangerous man from returning as America’s commander-in-chief even when Nikki Haley could not.

The post Nikki, We Hardly Knew Ye appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This is my tenth Granite State presidential primary, and this time, I am reporting for the Washington Monthly. In 1992, I started a family tradition of bringing one of our children along for the big final weekend of cold and snowy campaigning.

First came my son, Michael, then Thomas in 1996. In 2000, it was time for Caroline, our youngest, to make the weekend.

Like her brothers, Caroline traveled with me from one speech to another, listening to Democratic candidates and Republicans, telling us why each should be the country’s leader. 

Just 10 years old, Caroline, at one point, made an observation that floored me. She saw something in two of the candidates I had missed. It was how two candidates used their storytelling to get a point across. 

The first was Bill Bradley, a celebrity even when he played basketball for Princeton and, of course, later when he was “Dollar Bill” with the New York Knicks. Later, he’d, of course, be a Democratic senator from New Jersey.

In New Hampshire in 2000, Bradley was making a long-shot bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination from the heavy favorite, Vice President Al Gore. Bradley, who’d been raised south of St. Louis, Missouri, recounted how his team had been denied seating at a restaurant in the state’s southern bootheel because several teammates were African-American. The message was about racial prejudice and how it affected the young ballplayer. His story was real and unaffected. 

Bradley also told the story of a young boy who told him how he had to apologize to his uninsured mother for her having to write a check for a doctor’s visit. Bradley said that no young American kid should ever have to apologize to his mom or dad for getting sick.

The other speaker that Caroline and I saw that Sunday afternoon was Texas Governor George W. Bush. Anyone who had caught “W” on the stump knows the easy charm of the second President Bush and his ability—even as the Andover-Yale-Harvard heir to a political dynasty—to connect with everyday people. Unlike many other candidates, he radiates a genuine feel for people and their families. But Bush’s stories, full of folksiness, contained no real message. 

And this is what our ten-year-old daughter saw: the difference in their storytelling. “One candidate had something to say,” she said. “the other one didn’t.” 

Hearing Bradley and Bush speak on that same snowy afternoon offered a crystalline picture of their campaigns. For Bradley, it is explaining his thinking on matters of social and economic justice. For W., it was a way of introducing himself as the salt of the earth. 

This is the great advantage of New Hampshire’s primary: its intimacy. Part of it is owing to its relatively compact geography. New Hampshire is over 9,000 square miles, with the population centers in the south. By contrast, Iowa, home of the first caucuses, is over 50,000 square miles and with population centers spread more widely. Book your hotel room in Manchester, New Hampshire, and in a couple of days, you can easily witness the candidates in action and get to every event by car. The same is true for a citizen of New Hampshire who wants to see all the candidates. You can do it in Iowa, but it’s much harder.

When I started this kind of rental car following of the candidates with our son Michael in 1992, hitting Democratic presidential campaign events for Paul Tsongas, the former Massachusetts senator, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, Senator Bob Kerrey, and former California Governor Jerry Brown, I didn’t know I’d be witnessing one of the great pivots in political history. Clinton, through raw grit and an emotional connection with the people of New Hampshire, became the “Comeback Kid,” throwing off the weight of charges of an extramarital affair and a letter thanking an ROTC officer for “saving me from the draft.”  

And I remember our Thomas in 1996 sitting high up on my shoulders when Bob Dole approached and asked me how he would do that Tuesday. I didn’t have the heart to say Patrick Buchanan looked like he was about to beat him.

But it was Caroline who truly showed her stuff up there. In 2000, watching Gore, Bush, and their competitors, she could see the various candidates’ hearts and minds.

It turned out that neither Bradley nor Bush won that New Hampshire primary. One was too wonky, the other too hail-fellow-well-met. Ultimately, Vice President Al Gore won the 2000 New Hampshire primary. So did Arizona Senator John McCain, who crushed Bush and came through as a man of true character. 

New Hampshire voters retain an uncanny ability to see candidates for what they are. Living close together, starkly aware of the seasons, and recognizing that they’ve been entrusted by the rest of the nation of 330 million to winnow the field or be the grand jury—pick your metaphor—they take their job seriously and have a knack for picking apart characters and an understandable impatience for candidates who parachute in and out. This remains the greatness of the Granite State primary. I understand why the Democrats have scrapped it as their first primary state—its lack of racial diversity and the insistent lobbying of South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, to whom President Joe Biden owes his presidency. But South Carolina already picked the Democratic winner in 2008, 2016, and 2020 because of its large African American population, reflective of the significant dependency the party’s presidential candidates have on Black voters. The Palmetto State will likely choose the nominee again, and that’s great. But picking the winner and being first are not the same things. New Hampshire, at one-third the physical size of South Carolina, is a better first primary for America. For the Matthews clan and New Hampshirites, it’s a family affair.

The post The New Hampshire Primary: A Love Story appeared first on Washington Monthly.