Been a while since I posted. I am working on a large set of posts about Reagan and all his fuckery on my main site Sweaty’s Corner. If you want to check them out, this is the page where the posts will appear: The Fulcrum

So I’m at the Lanes, nursing a White Russian made with half and half that smelled like it had seen things, and Maude slides a piece of paper down the lane at me. Not a score sheet. A chart. About strikes, man. In a bowling alley.

It wasn’t even a good chart, but there was a line on it that sat on the floor for decades and then went pretty goddamn vertical right around 1981. I’ve been staring at it for three days.

“Before 1980,” Maude says, flat as a lane, “employers used permanent replacements in fewer than two percent of strikes. In the 1980s, more than fourteen percent.”

“Okay,” I say. “So what changed in 1980?”

“The law didn’t.”

“Then what the fuck did?”

“Mackay Radio, 1938. The Supreme Court mentioned, in passing, that an employer could hire strikebreakers and wasn’t required to fire them when the strike ended. Forty-three years sitting in a drawer.”

A tool in a drawer, man. Like that thing under the sink you’ve never used, and then one day somebody uses it on a pipe and it works, and suddenly you realize you’ve been living next to a wrench the whole time.

Share

The Rules

What happened in 1981 is this. About thirteen thousand air traffic controllers went on strike on August 3. Reagan gave them forty-eight hours to come back. They didn’t. He fired more than eleven thousand of them.

Here’s the thing that gets me. Nine and a half months earlier, he’d written their union a letter, promising “a spirit of cooperation.” A spirit of cooperation, man. That’s the same energy as telling me the rug really ties the room together and then watching a stranger piss on it. And technically he never promised not to fire anybody. A promise with no handles. You can’t pick it up, so you can’t hold it against him.

That’s when Walter, who has been standing there the entire time doing his Walter thing, loses his shit.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dude! They broke the goddamn law! Federal employees can’t strike. They took an oath. These people keep airplanes from hitting each other, you stoned son of a bitch. Coolidge did it to the Boston cops in 1919 and Reagan hung the guy’s picture in the Cabinet Room. This is not ‘Nam, Dude. This is the sky. There are rules.”

And the annoying part is, Walter’s right. The strike was illegal. The union guy, Poli, made a terrible bet that the government would flinch, and the government did not flinch. If that’s all this was, it’d be a story about a bad bet.

But that’s the thing about Walter. He’s right about the wrong rule. The law explains why Reagan could fire them. It doesn’t explain the ultimatum, or the rehire ban that lasted until Clinton lifted it in 1993, or the fact that every boss in America took notes.

“What’s a permanent replacement?” Donny says.

“Donny, you’re out of your fucking element.”

“It means the job isn’t yours when the strike is over,” Maude says. “That’s the whole thing.”

“Oh,” says Donny. “That’s fucked up.”

“That’s different, Donny,” Walter says. “That’s private sector. Those air traffic guys worked for the government. Different goddamn rules.”

“Is it, though,” I say.

Maude has the numbers. Hormel. Phelps Dodge. International Paper. Greyhound. Employers who used the tool, one after another, and a Phelps Dodge president who put the whole thing in a sentence, according to the historian who wrote the book on it: “Suddenly people realized, Hell, you can beat a union.”

Union membership was 20.1 percent of workers in 1983. Seventeen point seven million people. Today it’s 10.0 percent. “Not all of that is PATCO,” Maude adds. “Trade. Factories closing. But the permission structure changed.”

The permission structure, man. The law never changed. Somebody just went first, and nothing happened to him.

That’s the thing with the rug. It’s not the first time somebody pees on it. It’s the second time, after nobody does anything about the first, and now it’s just a rug people pee on.

I don’t know what that says about America, man. I’ve got a chart and a headache, and I’m out of half and half. The guys who got fired didn’t get rehired for twelve years. Nobody’s brought back my rug either.

The Dude abides.

The Dude is midway through a White Russian and midway through a frame when it comes to him, unprompted, the way things do. Wasn’t there a whole new political party? Some rich dude was gonna start one? He can’t remember if it actually happened or if he dreamed it, which happens more than he’d admit to Walter.

“The America Party,” Donny says, unhelpfully proud of himself for knowing something. “Elon started it.”

“Elon didn’t start shit,” Walter says, setting his ball down like it personally offended him. “You know what this is? This is not the Reform Party. This is the United States fucking government. There are rules, Donny. You don’t just walk in with a checkbook and a grudge and stand up a new fucking government like it’s a Sizzler franchise. Am I wrong?”

Nobody answers him. Nobody ever does.

“So what happened to it,” the Dude says, mostly to the universe.

“Nothing happened to it,” Walter says. “That’s the whole point. Third parties don’t happen. They announce a press conference, they poll great for one news cycle, and six months later everybody remembers there’s a two-party system and two seats at the table and no chairs get added no matter how much money you light on fire.”

“Didn’t we used to have other parties, though?” Donny says. “Like, weren’t there Whigs?”

Walter looks at him the way you look at a dog that’s just eaten something off the sidewalk. “Donny, you’re out of your fucking element.”

Share

“He’s actually not,” Maude says, because Maude is always the one who shows up right when a conversation’s about to die of stupidity.

She lays it out flat, no performance to it, the way she’d read a prescription label. The Whigs weren’t some fringe outfit. They were one of the two real parties in the country for about twenty years starting in the 1830s, formed specifically to run against Andrew Jackson, and they won the White House twice. Then in 1854 Congress passed something called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reopened the question of slavery in the western territories, and the Whigs had spent a decade quietly not talking about slavery across their Northern and Southern halves. The bill made quiet not-talking impossible. The party split down the middle in about one election cycle and never came back together.

Here’s the part that actually matters, she says, looking at Donny like he asked a better question than he thinks he did. Nothing new got voted in next to the wreckage. The Republican Party got founded that same year, 1854, built on purpose to be the landing spot for Northern Whigs who needed somewhere to go immediately, plus the anti-slavery Democrats and the Free Soilers, all pouring into the same seat before anyone else could grab it. It wasn’t three parties splitting a vote. It was one seat going empty and something new moving in before the paint dried.

It wasn’t even clean, she adds. For a couple years a nativist outfit called the American Party, the Know Nothings, looked like they might be the ones who inherited it instead. They surged hard, then fell apart just as fast, because they couldn’t hold together any better than the Whigs had. The Republicans are just the ones still standing when the music stopped. By 1860, six years after they existed at all, they won the presidency outright. The Whigs, who’d run the show twenty years before that, were just gone. Not shrunk. Gone.

Walter’s quiet for exactly one second, which for Walter is a long time.

“Fine,” he says. “So the new guy just needs to be the right guy. That’s all that was missing here.”

“That’s not how it happened,” Maude says. “Nothing new beat the old party in a fair fight. Something already positioned to catch the pieces wore the corpse like a skin and kept walking. Big difference.”

“This is exactly what I’ve been saying,” Walter says, to nobody, about a thing he was not saying two minutes ago. “You know who else thought you could just reset things and get back to how they used to be? Everybody who’s ever tried it. I heard some lady on a podcast saying the whole country’s gonna snap back to normal the second the current guy’s gone, like normal’s sitting in a drawer waiting to get plugged back in. It’s not walking back in, Donny. There’s no fucking ‘back.’ There’s just whoever’s standing there when the door opens.”

Donny opens his mouth. Walter tells him he’s out of his fucking element again, preemptively, before Donny’s even said a word, just to be safe.

The Dude thinks about the rug for a second. Not because anybody brings it up. It just arrives, the way it does. That rug really tied the room together, and once some guy pissed on it, that was it, there was no version of the room going back to how it was before, no matter how many other rugs you bought after. You just live in the room you’ve got now.

“Sometimes you eat the party,” the Dude says, to his drink, “and sometimes, man, the party eats you.”

Nobody responds to that either. It’s his turn to roll anyway.

The Dude abides.

A guy shows the Dude a fundraising number, and it turns out you can spend ninety million dollars and still not get the rug back.

So I’m at the lanes, working on a White Russian that Donny swears is made with real half and half and not whatever he found behind the shoe rental counter, and I’m just scrolling, the way a man does, and a number stops me cold, man, mid-sip.

Ninety million dollars. That’s what it says. Amy McGrath, a few years back, spent ninety million dollars trying to beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Lost by twenty points. Twenty. That’s not a close one, man. That’s not even a bowling score. That’s a shutout with the bumpers up.

I said, huh.

Then Maude walks in, because Maude always walks in right when a number needs saying correctly, and she tells me the actual record that cycle was Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, a hundred and nine million dollars against Lindsey Graham, and he still lost by ten. Ninety percent of that money, she says, came from outside South Carolina. People in Ohio and California mailing checks to a Senate race they cannot vote in, to a state some of them will never once visit, because they wanted, very badly, to watch one specific man lose.

Graham himself, when they asked him about it, just said the money is because they hate my guts. Which, credit where it’s due, is more self-aware than most of what comes out of a press shop.

This is when Walter stands up. He does not need to stand up, we are sitting at a table, but Walter stands up.

“This is not correlation, Dude. This is a fucking pattern. This is Vietnam.”

“It’s not Vietnam, Walter.”

“I’m not talking about the war, I’m talking about the doctrine, I’m talking about how you keep escalating a losing position because pulling out feels like admitting the position was fucked from the jump, and nobody wants to be the guy who says it was fucked from the jump, so instead you send another ninety million dollars into Kentucky. Are you following me? Am I wrong?”

Donny, who has been quiet, mostly because Donny is always quiet until precisely the wrong moment, goes, “So the money didn’t do anything?”

“Donny, you’re out of your fucking element. The money did plenty. It bought television. It bought yard signs nobody in Kentucky asked for. It bought political consultant’s beach houses. What it did not buy is two million people who wanted to vote for Amy McGrath, because those people were never there to begin with, and no amount of half and half of uncertain provenance changes what’s actually in the carton.”

That last part was mine. I liked that one.

Share

Here’s the thing, though, and this is where it stops being about ninety million dollars and starts being about the rug. Because the rug tied the room together. And when the rug got peed on, that was that, man. No amount of money brought the rug back. You could go buy a new rug. It would not be the rug. The room would still not be tied together, not really, and everybody standing in it would still be able to tell.

That’s what the McConnell money is. That’s what the Graham money is. It’s not a strategy, it’s grief with a donate button bolted on. Somebody hurt you, over years, and there is nothing you can personally do about the guy who hurt you, so you send nine dollars to whoever is running against him in a state you’ve never set foot in, and for about four seconds the room feels tied together again. Then Election Day happens, the room is still not tied together, and now there is also nine dollars less in the world, and Kentucky is still, somehow, Kentucky.

Beto’s the interesting case, actually, because Maude looked this one up too. First time, 2018, against Cruz, eighty million dollars, lost by two and a half points. That one almost worked, man. That one was close enough that you can’t even call it grief money, that was a real campaign that happened to lose. Then he ran it back in 2022 for governor, against Abbott, raised almost as much all over again, and lost by eleven. Same donors. Same energy. Same guy telling everybody he was born to be in it. Except the second time it wasn’t a campaign anymore, it was a subscription.

Walter’s already onto the next one before I can finish the thought.

“You know who’s got a live one right now? Sununu. New Hampshire. They weren’t even supposed to be spending real money there, they were out chasing Texas, chasing Kansas for fuck’s sake, playing with house money in states that were never realistically in play, and meanwhile the seat that was supposed to be free and clear is sitting at a two point race. That’s not a strategy, Dude. That’s a guy buying an extremely expensive round for the wrong end of the bar while somebody walks off with his stool.”

I don’t know what it says about anything, man. I’m not going to sit here and tell you what it says about the country, or the donor class, or whatever it was that number was supposed to make me feel. I just know close to two hundred million dollars went into two states in one year and neither state changed its mind, and somewhere in Kentucky there’s a guy who was never once going to vote for Amy McGrath, sitting on a couch that ninety million dollars did not buy him, watching a commercial that ninety million dollars did buy, wondering who exactly these people think they’re talking to.

The rug’s not walking back through that door, man. That was never what the money was for.

The Dude abides.

Donny slides his phone across the lane like it’s evidence. “Dude, check this out.” First thought, no joke, has to be a joke. Some parody site running the same URL scam as the fake DMV renewal pages that get your card number. Then the address bar says whitehouse.gov, plain as the rug used to be, and the rug is still gone, and now there’s a Snake game where the whole point is helping Homeland Security do headcount.

Five games total. Wall Tetris. A Trump savings piggy bank. School lunch sorting. A bald eagle carrying a bill over the Mall like it’s late for something. And the one everybody’s actually talking about, a straight-up Snake clone, except the dots you’re eating are people, rendered in little pixel outfits with different skin tones, gathered up along a fence line. That’s not a metaphor doing some work. That’s the literal mechanic.

Walter’s not bowling anymore. Walter’s standing. “This is not ‘Nam, man. This is Snake. There are rules, and rule number one is you do not reskin a fuckin’ public domain arcade mechanic as a goddamn deportation simulator and then act shocked when Tetris’s actual legal department puts out a goddamn statement.” He’s right about that part, mostly. Tetris did go on the record. “We take copyright infringement very seriously,” seven words, cold as a February patrol shift, and Walter reads it out loud twice like it’s scripture.

Donny, still holding his ball, asks the only real question in the room. “Are the little guys, like, people? Real people?” Nobody answers him directly, which is its own answer.

Maude has the numbers, delivered the way she delivers everything, like she’s reading a lab report to someone who fainted at the sight of blood. Median home price around four hundred thirty thousand dollars. Groceries roughly thirty percent above where they sat in twenty twenty. Gas about forty five percent higher than the twenty twenty average, even after easing off the recent peak. Against that backdrop, a White House official told a reporter the arcade exists to contrast a culture of fun and winning against what the official called the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America, nine words, and Maude lets that sit in the room a second before going back to her tea.

Share

The Dude thinks about the rug. Not as a bit, as a unit. The rug tied the room together and some fascist violated it and there was never any restitution, just a long tab and worse carpet. A whole federal website went up this week, coded, hosted, apparently play tested, and it doesn’t tie one single thing together. It’s just somebody’s Rio Grande fed through a Nokia Snake engine, a bald eagle late for a floor vote, and Trump savings account confetti, and no rug anywhere in the metaphor gets replaced.

Walter wants to file something. A complaint, a brief, a grievance with a federal agency, he’s not sure which one yet, he just knows somebody should have to answer for it under oath. Donny asks if they’re still bowling. Walter tells him he’s out of his fucking element, Donny, again, same as always, and somehow that lands more honestly than anything on the arcade’s About page.

The Dude doesn’t have a thesis. He’s not going to pretend the internet inventing a new low is a new low, because he watched this exact country do worse with better production values back when he had different hair and a felony he’d rather not discuss. He’s just going to note, out loud, to nobody, that they built a whole arcade and somehow still made a worse game than the one that already exists for free on every dead Nokia in America.

He’s hungry. That’s the whole review.

The Dude abides.

Everybody keeps saying the other guys need to be sent to the wilderness for a while. Nobody has checked whether we have one.

So I’m at the lanes on a Wednesday, which is not league night, which means I’m there for reasons that are entirely my own, and there’s a guy two lanes over talking about politics into his phone at a volume that suggests he’s forgotten other people exist. And he says the thing. You’ve heard the thing. He says what this country needs is for those guys to be out of power long enough that the fever breaks.

And I’m nodding along, because it sounds right, man. It’s got a rhythm to it. Fever breaks. Sure.

And then somewhere around the seventh frame it occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea where the wilderness is.

Like geographically. Institutionally. Whatever. Where do you put them? Because in my head this whole time there’s been some kind of holding area, some place off to the side where a political party goes and sits and thinks about what it’s done, and then comes back different. And I have been picturing this for years without once asking whether the room exists.

I brought this up. Obviously I brought this up.

Walter did not care for the question. “The wilderness, Dude, is a metaphor. It’s not a place. You send a party into the wilderness by defeating them at the ballot box, repeatedly, until the leadership is discredited and the moderates reassert control. This is how it has always worked. This is Goldwater. This is 1964. There is a process.”

And okay. Fine. That’s the one real example anybody’s got, and Walter’s got it, and he’s standing up about it, which he does not need to be doing.

But run it out, man. Goldwater got buried in ‘64. Forty-four states. It was not close, it was barely a contest. And the party did change afterward, Walter’s right about that part, that absolutely happened.

It changed into more of what just lost.

The moderates did not come back. The guys who lost got the keys, kept them for sixteen years, and returned as Reagan. That’s the case study. That’s the whole precedent everybody’s leaning on. A party got sent to the wilderness, went in, and came out as a more concentrated version of the thing that got it sent there in the first place.

So Walter’s not wrong that there’s a process. He’s just the only one in the building who’s actually looked at where the process goes.

Donny, who had been paying attention to none of this, said, “so where do they go though?”

“Donny. You’re out of your fucking element.”

And nobody said anything after that, because nobody ever does. But he’d asked the only real question in the building, which is somehow always how it goes with that guy.

Maude explained it to me, and I wish she hadn’t

It took Maude about ninety seconds and she did it in that tone she has, the one where she’s not being unkind, she’s just genuinely puzzled that this needs saying out loud.

There’s a floor, she said. Roughly forty-six percent. In a country with two doors and a rule that you have to walk through one of them, about that much of the vote is committed before anybody says a word, and it does not move regardless of what happens. Not for a scandal. Not for a catastrophe. Not for anything. Both parties have one. It’s structural.

Which means, she said, and here she paused in a way I did not enjoy, there is no scenario in which either party is away. The losing side is permanently one bad quarter away from a Senate majority. There is no exile. The room you are picturing does not exist and has never existed and cannot be built.

Then she asked if I was going to finish that drink, in a way that made it clear she was not asking about the drink.

Share

So I’ve been sitting with this, and here’s where I’ve landed.

Everybody I read, everybody I listen to, half the guys at the lanes, they’ve all got a plan that runs through the wilderness. The other side goes away for a while, cools off, and comes back reasonable, and in the meantime we fix things. That’s the plan. That’s everybody’s plan. Left, right, the guys who used to be right and now write newsletters about how bad the right got, all of them.

And it’s a plan that requires a place that isn’t real.

It’s like making elaborate arrangements to have a conversation with somebody in a room in your house that you’ve never actually been in. You know where it is. You could point to it. You’ve been describing it to people. And then one day you go looking for the door and there’s just wall.

Walter says this is defeatist. Walter says the metaphor still works even if the place isn’t literal. And sure, Walter. Metaphors work great right up until you build a whole strategy on top of one and then go looking for the load-bearing part.

Because that’s the thing, man. Waiting isn’t a strategy. Waiting is a feeling with a calendar attached to it. And I say this as a man who has made waiting into something close to a lifestyle, so I know it when I see it. I’m an expert, actually. I have a real feel for the difference between resting and stalling, and I can tell you that from the inside they are indistinguishable, which is exactly why it’s such a comfortable place to set up shop.

I don’t have a better plan. I want to be upfront about that. I’m not the guy with the plan. I’m the guy who noticed the room isn’t there.

But I do think there’s a difference between a bad plan and a plan that’s waiting on a thing that cannot arrive, and I think most people currently have the second one and believe they have the first one. The first one you can fix. The second one just sits there being comfortable until enough time goes by that it’s not a plan anymore, it’s a thing you say.

It’s a little like the rug, honestly. I spent a lot of energy on the assumption that the rug situation would resolve, that somebody somewhere was going to make it right, that there was a process. And the process, as it turned out, was several men lying to me in sequence while a woman with her own agenda moved me around a board I couldn’t see. The rug did not come back. Nobody came and made it right. What actually happened is that I adjusted to a room that didn’t tie together anymore, which I want to be clear is not the same thing as a solution, it’s just what happened.

Anyway. Fever’s not breaking, man. The fever isn’t even the thing. The fever is just the part you can see.

The Dude abides. Somebody else is going to have to figure out where.

The Dude’s been on the road playing league games, and well, he’s a lazy man, so his posting has become more sporadic. The Dude will try to do better.

Guy at the gas station is going on about media literacy. Not to me, just out loud, to the pump, the way people process podcasts now. Somebody with a mic and a take had him rattled. Everybody’s dumber than they used to be, apparently. Can’t separate spin from fact. There was a time, supposedly, before all this, when the electorate had its shit together.

I’m standing there with a squeegee thinking, man, when.

Because I’ve read some history, and the American public’s relationship with the truth has never once resembled a functioning marriage. It’s always been more of an arrangement. Hamilton had a paper. Jefferson, annoyed, went and bought his own paper specifically to call Hamilton a liar in print, which is a genuinely baller use of early republic money. That’s not bias slipping into the news. That’s two guys paying to have the news say what they already believed, on purpose, in public. Yellow journalism helped talk the country into a war over Cuba because it moved copies. “Objectivity” as a journalistic value didn’t arrive because Americans demanded fairness. It arrived because the wire services needed copy that Republican and Democrat papers alike would pay to run without either one canceling the subscription. Neutral tone was a distribution hack wearing a trench coat and calling itself an ethic.

So the golden age everybody’s nostalgic for, Cronkite, the Big Three, the fairness doctrine, wasn’t the public getting sharp. It was the public getting a smaller menu. Three networks run by roughly the same eight guys in roughly the same building told you roughly the same story every night, and when there’s only one story on offer, not falling for spin doesn’t require any skill at all. It requires attendance. That’s not literacy. That’s a captive audience mistaking consensus for competence, and mistaking Walter’s voice for the sound of being informed. It’s the same move as looking at somebody’s art, being told it’s about something bigger than what’s literally in front of you, and nodding along because the person explaining it seems awfully sure of herself. Doesn’t make the art dishonest. Doesn’t make you wrong to nod. Just means “objective” and “curated by people with a very specific idea of what mattered” turned out to be the same rug the whole time, and nobody checked underneath it.

Lippmann figured this out in 1922, before television existed, arguing that expecting regular people to track world affairs directly instead of through a middleman’s summary was never a reasonable ask. Forty years later some poor political scientist actually surveyed the electorate and discovered most people’s political opinions don’t even connect to each other in any coherent way. Not new information. Just repeatedly rediscovered, like a rerun nobody remembers watching.

Here’s the part that’s actually bad news, and I mean the actual news, not the guy at the pump’s version of it. The public’s discernment was never good. It was subsidized. Three gatekeepers did a first pass on the information before it ever reached you, and however compromised that pass was, it was still a pass. Now there’s no pass. Everybody’s an outlet, the algorithm doesn’t care if it’s true, it cares if you stayed, and the exact same mediocre, historically unremarkable level of public discernment that always existed now has to do the whole job alone, with no wire service quietly filtering upstream. It’s not that the guy got dumber. It’s that they took the training wheels off a bike he was never actually that good at riding and called the resulting crash a character failure.

Anyway. Man’s out here mourning an era that mostly worked because there was nothing else on.

The Dude abides.

Michael Cohen went looking for a pardon and found a whole redemption arc just lying around, free for the taking.

So there’s this whole deal, man, where the President of the United States calls into some guy’s AM radio show, and the guy used to write books calling the president a con man, and now the guy’s saying “sir” on tape like he’s reporting for duty. And the entire online resistance is walking around today with their jaws on the floor, man, like they just found out the rug they’d been standing on for six years had somebody’s whole personality tied up in it this whole time. It didn’t, though. It was always just a rug. You just liked what it did for the room.

Then and Now, Same Guy the Whole Time

Character’s flat. It’s the market for it that moves.

Back in 2020 the man wrote a whole book and the takeaway was, roughly, con man, mobster, racist, the ugly list, all of it. Sold pretty well. This week, on tape, calling the same guy “sir.” Not “I’ve had time to reflect and my views have evolved,” just “sir,” like he’s back on the clock, ready to cash the check. And here’s the thing that should bother you more than it seems to be bothering anybody: neither version was a performance. That’s the part nobody wants to sit with. He believed the book while he was writing it, and he believes the “sir” while he’s saying it, because the guy was never actually converting to anything. He was reading the room. Six years the room said hate him. This month the room started saying something else. Same tenant, new paint.

Share

Everybody’s Shocked, Man, Just Shocked

A parade of people acting like they didn’t already know how this movie ends.

Watched a former GOP strategist go on the record comparing the whole reunion to an abuse victim crawling back to the guy who hurt her. Strong image. Not wrong, necessarily. Kind of funny coming from the same media ecosystem that had this dude on a book tour for half a decade calling it courage. George Conway got on TV and called it a “narcissistic lovefest,” which, yeah, correct, but my man, you’re describing the weather, not breaking news. And then there’s the guy who went out of his way to remind everybody that he, personally, was one of the few who actually pushed back on Cohen instead of nodding along, which is its own little genre now, “I was skeptical the whole time,” retroactively, once it’s safe to say so. Wrote that Cohen “conned so many liberals,” which, sure, but my dude, some of those liberals had the man on speed dial.

The Client Is Also the Client, Man

A fixer’s whole job is making somebody else’s problem disappear. Turns out he still had inventory.

Here’s the part that’s actually funny instead of just sad. Everybody’s out here calling this a grift like that’s a gotcha. It’s not a gotcha, man, it’s a fuckin’ job description. The guy spent twelve years professionally making Donald Trump’s problems go away. Then he spent eight years professionally making himself look like the guy who’d never do that again. And now, get this, he’s doing the exact same job he always did, except this time the client who needs the problem fixed is himself, and the problem that needs fixing is Michael Cohen’s standing with the one man who can hand out a pardon. Same skill set. Same posture. Same guy leaning over the desk saying let me handle this. He just finally ran out of other people’s messes and started billing himself.

Somebody’s Gonna Reach for the Big Explanation

Before anybody says it: no. It wasn’t a plan. Trump can’t hold a bit that long.

Somebody out there is already halfway to typing that this was the design all along, that Trump ran a years-long operation to humiliate the entire resistance media apparatus and Cohen was the plant. He didn’t, man. Look at the guy. He can’t sit through a briefing without going off script. You think he ran an eight-year sting? No. It’s simpler than that and dumber than that, which is worse, honestly, because it means nobody has to be a genius for this to keep happening. It just has to keep being profitable. But somebody, and I’d bet on the network that built him a whole branded show and then dropped him with a one-line memo, is going to reach for the genius-plan version anyway. Because “we got outmaneuvered by a mastermind” beats “we didn’t ask a single hard question for six years” every single time. Watch for it. It’s coming.

The Dude abides.

Okay, so here’s the thing, man.

There’s a cabinet secretary. Nine kids. Used to get chucked around an MTV pool for money before he ran off to regulate the country’s trucks and planes. This guy signs off on a taxpayer-adjacent reality show, sits his eighteen year old down in the kitchen on camera, and tells her that Harvard has basically industrialized the process of taking a good kid and turning her, and this is the actual phrase, “perverted and contorted.” Twice. Man workshopped that line in the mirror.

Then they turn the comments off on the video. He wants the whole country to watch him defend his daughter’s soul on television, but God forbid the country actually replies to him about it. That’s not a father protecting his kid, man. That’s a guy protecting a clip.

Then he drives to the actual campus, talks to an actual priest, and by the end of the same goddamn episode he’s telling the camera he’s come around, maybe a strong kid can handle it after all, maybe eighteen years of raising her right was enough. The whole corrupting-young-minds bit lasted exactly as long as it took him to show up and meet somebody nice. That’s not a principle. That’s stage fright.

So where’d the kid land? University of Chicago. Same place her sister went. And I’m not gonna shit on Chicago, it’s a hell of a school, it’s the one FIRE actually ranks near the top of the entire country for free speech, which, if you squint, is the single most on-brand outcome available to a guy who just spent an episode saying he wants his kid exposed to real ideas instead of one viewpoint. Funny how that worked out for him.

But here’s what’s actually going on under the rug, man. Nobody in that family said no to the machine. Nobody turned down the brand, the resume line, the thing that opens every fucking door for the rest of your life regardless of what you had to swallow to get it. They just shopped for a version of the same machine that wouldn’t embarrass dad on cable news. Harvard was too expensive politically. Chicago was on sale. Same rug. Different room.

That’s the tell. If this was really about keeping her soul clean, you send her to a state school, a Catholic university, someplace that isn’t also a hall pass into finance and law and the entire American ruling class. You don’t do that. The thing being protected here was never her soul. It was the credential. Just wearing a jersey dad can defend on Fox.

One more thing, and nobody in that kitchen scene is thinking about it. This show is bankrolled in part by a nonprofit that takes money from Boeing, United, and Lyft, three companies that report to Sean Duffy’s actual day job. Guy spends the episode worried about institutions professionalizing corruption, meanwhile he’s out here soft launching vertical integration between his regulatory portfolio and his content calendar. Nobody clipped that part for Twitter. I clipped that part.

Anyway. Kid’s going to a great school. Dad got his content. Boeing got its placement. Everybody wins, in the way everybody always wins.

The Dude abides.

man, it’s not even a metaphor, they just call her that

Okay so here’s the thing, man. There’s a guy. Eighty years old. Leader of the free world, allegedly. And he’s got a woman who follows him around with an actual physical printer so he doesn’t have to look at a screen. Prints out the news. Prints out the tweets that make him feel good. Now, apparently, she’s graduated to just typing his Truth Social posts directly, since a Wall Street Journal thing found she posts to his accounts on his behalf outside business hours once he’s nodded along. That’s not an aide anymore, man. That’s a human input device. That’s a peripheral. And everybody in Washington acted shocked, shocked, when this became a story, like the guy hasn’t been walking around with his own personal printer for two fucking years.

They used to call her the human printer on the golf course. Now she IS the account. Some evolution, man. Some real character arc.

The Catering Truck Job

cabinet secretaries as the diversion, dude, that’s the whole bit

So then there’s Turkey. NATO summit, credible Iranian missile threat, and the plan, and I cannot stress enough that this is a real plan the Secret Service actually executed, was to load the actual president into a catering truck. A food service vehicle. Rolled him right off the tarmac like he’s smuggling himself out of a wedding he doesn’t want to pay for.

And here’s the part that’s got the whole bowling alley talking. Who gets the real plane and who gets left on the decoy wearing the Air Force One callsign like a piece of bait? Defense Secretary, sure, makes sense, chain of command and whatnot. Deputy Chief of Staff, fine. And then aide number three: the printer. Meanwhile Secretary of State lil’ Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are sitting on the missile-bait plane with the entire White House press pool, presumably reviewing their own life insurance policies. Cabinet officials and reporters, left as the distraction, so a executive assistant with a printer could ride home in the safe car.

That is not a security protocol, man. That’s a seating chart that tells you everything about who’s actually running the show. And two days after this broke, the press secretary just up and quit. Coincidence? The Dude does not believe in coincidence when a plane full of missile bait is involved.

Share

Then This Guy From Georgia Says One Word

and the whole apparatus loses its shit, man

So this senator, Ossoff, Georgia, running for reelection, gives a speech. Says the president doesn’t want to do the job. Says he’d rather build his ballroom and “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace,” which, first of all, incredible bit of writing, second of all, he wrote it himself apparently, third of all he used “their” instead of “his” and that possessive is doing violence, man, quiet, structural violence.

Google searches for her name spiked five thousand percent. Five thousand. That’s not a news cycle, that’s a supernova.

And the White House response, this is the part that’s really something, the White House response was to lose their entire minds. Communications Director Steven Cheung, actual taxpayer-funded federal employee, went and called the senator “the biggest cuck loser in politics.” That’s not spin, man. That’s not messaging. That’s a guy who got dumped in high school finally getting his shot at a microphone.

And then here comes Megyn Kelly, right on cue, absolutely floored, just floored, that anyone would suggest impropriety, insisting Ossoff was “clearly implying that Trump is having an affair.” This from a woman who Trump once said had blood coming out of her wherever. The hypocrisy isn’t subtle, man. It’s not even hypocrisy at this point, it’s performance art. It’s a rug that doesn’t tie the room together so much as it just sits there, soaked, daring you to mention it.

Trump himself, when asked, called the guy Pee-wee Herman and pivoted to bragging about his ballroom. Which, credit where due, is at least on brand.

Even the Guys on Our Side Couldn’t Leave It Alone

this is a complicated case, Maude, lot of ins, lot of outs

Now here’s my favorite part, and I mean genuinely, this is where it gets good. David Axelrod, Obama’s guy, gets on Twitter and scolds Ossoff. Says the line was “gratuitous and unnecessary.” Very statesmanlike. Very above it all. Except one day later, twenty four hours, Axelrod is back online saying actually the security clearance thing, the fact that this woman apparently refused to get cleared for over a year while sitting closer to the president than anyone alive, that’s a “deadly serious issue.” So he went from scolding the joke to confirming the premise of the joke in under a day. That’s not a correction, man. That’s a guy watching the bowling ball hit every pin on the second roll and pretending he called it.

A professor named Dave Karpf took Axelrod apart for this on his Substack, and the line that stuck with me was that it takes real effort to be this wrong in so few words. Which, hell, I’d put on a t shirt.

"It takes real effort to be this wrong in so few words." David Karpf

Then over at the Bulwark, JVL wrote the piece that actually gets at the sick genius of the whole thing, which is that everyone wants this to be an affair because an affair would be normal. An affair would make sense. His actual point, and I’m paraphrasing exactly one time here because it’s too good not to, is that it would be much better if they were sleeping together. Because the real thing, whatever the real thing is, is weirder and sadder than that.

"It would be much better if they were sleeping together." - JVL

And Charlie Sykes, bless him, spent two straight newsletters covering this story and then, both times, pivoted hard into warning everybody about the DSA taking over the Democratic Party, like a guy who can’t finish a sentence about one crisis without flinching toward a different one. He called Cheung’s statement “rhetorical feculence,” which is a hell of a phrase for a guy also worried about people being too mean online.

The Whole Thing, Man

You got cabinet secretaries riding the bait plane. You got a communications director who talks like a message board in 2011. You got a cable news host performing outrage on behalf of a woman she’s never met while ignoring a decade of receipts against her own guy. You got a Democratic strategist who needed a full day to catch up to his own point. And in the middle of it, one woman with a printer, now apparently upgraded to full ghostwriter status, closer to the nuclear codes than the Secretary of State.

Nobody planned this as a metaphor. Nobody had to. Sometimes the government just hands you the rug and it’s already soaked and it already ties the room together, and all you gotta do is not step on it too hard.

The Dude abides.

The DSA has some lunatics. Sure. The Dude would just like to discuss the telephone pole sticking out of the other guy’s eye.

(this will make a lot more sense if you read this Is the DSA a Republican Psy-Op? first - PDF of the post since it is behind a paywall)

Walter has something in his eye.

Not metaphorically. There is an actual piece of wood sticking out of Walter’s face.

The Dude points this out.

Walter says it’s nothing.

It is not nothing. It appears to be a section of dimensional lumber. Possibly pressure-treated. Whatever it is, OSHA would probably like a word.

Meanwhile, Walter is very concerned about the tiny speck in the other guy’s eye.

“Look at that, Dude. Look at that fucking thing.”

Walter, man.

You have a two-by-four sticking out of your skull.

This is approximately where the Dude finds himself after reading Jonathan V. Last’s latest dispatch from The Bulwark, “Is the DSA a Republican Psy-Op?”

And here’s the annoying part:

JVL has a point.

Those Are Some Pretty Fucked-Up Cherries, Man

The Democratic Socialists of America have said some extraordinarily stupid shit.

Not Chad from the Brooklyn chapter after three beers.

Not @DialecticalDaddy69 posting from a phone at 2:17 in the morning.

The actual organization.

JVL makes a point of establishing this distinction. The material he cites consists of official DSA statements—written, edited, approved and published in the institutional voice of the organization.

And some of it is fucking awful.

The DSA recently commemorated Fidel Castro as an enduring symbol of anti-imperialist struggle while accusing Marco Rubio of waging “genocide” against Cuba.

After Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, the organization called him a warmonger, a corporate shill and a “perpetrator of genocide,” then went on to suggest Kamala Harris was sufficiently indistinguishable from Trump that members could reasonably abstain or vote third party.

Its statement on Russia invading Ukraine managed to condemn the invasion while also taking the scenic route through NATO expansion, American imperialism and the proposition that Washington helped “set the stage” for Putin’s war.

Okay.

The Dude does not feel compelled to defend any of that.

Castro was a dictator. Putin invaded Ukraine. “Genocide” is not a synonym for “foreign policy I really, really dislike.”

There. Easy.

And the DSA itself says it has more than 100,000 members, so this isn’t six Trotskyists arguing over possession of a mimeograph machine. It is a real political organization with real influence on the American left.

So when Hakeem Jeffries was asked whether he endorsed the DSA agenda and said, basically, no, the Dude does not see the problem.

He isn’t in the DSA man.

Why the fuck would he endorse its entire agenda?

That exchange is literally where JVL’s piece begins.

So far, so good.

Then JVL brings out the tape measure.

And this is where things get interesting.

Subscribe now

Fine. Don’t Put the Tape Measure Away.

Near the end of the piece, JVL lays down a rule.

You can’t judge a political organization only by the ideas you like. If you affiliate yourself with it, you’re on the hook for the ugly stuff too.

You know what?

Fair.

The Dude accepts these terms and conditions.

No need to scroll.

Click AGREE.

Now leave the fucking tape measure on the table.

Because we’re going to use it on everybody.

And suddenly the Republican side of the room starts getting awfully nervous.

For decades, American conservatism has had its own collection of cranks, paranoids, theocrats, racial obsessives, constitutional cosplay enthusiasts and guys who have Very Important Thoughts about what the Federal Reserve is hiding.

The John Birch Society did not invent right-wing conspiracism, and right-wing conspiracism did not disappear when respectable conservatives stopped inviting the Birchers to dinner.

Small-l libertarianism has produced its own delightful collection of ideas that poll somewhere between “mandatory root canal” and “let raccoons administer the fire department.”

Then came the Tea Party.

Then MAGA.

Then QAnon.

Then January 6.

Then election denial became less a weird thing your uncle posted on Facebook and more of a credential in Republican primaries.

In 2026, Republicans who played roles in challenging or trying to overturn the 2020 election are competitive for governorships in several major battleground states. A Washington Post examination found at least 30 Republican gubernatorial candidates advocating election-system overhauls, with prominent contenders in states including Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin having participated in challenges to the 2020 result.

That is not a guy handing out pamphlets behind the bowling alley.

Those people could be governors.

Walter?

Still with us?

“Those Guys Don’t Count, Dude”

This is where the exemptions begin.

The Birchers?

Not real conservatives.

The militia guys?

Fringe.

QAnon?

Internet nuts.

Christian nationalists?

Come on, Dude. That’s complicated.

Election deniers?

Just pandering to the base.

Trump?

Well.

Trump is Trump.

At some point we have exempted so many people from the Republican coalition that the Republican coalition apparently consists of David French, three Bulwark subscribers and a ghostly image of George Will floating above a stack of back issues of National Review.

Meanwhile, DSA releases one deranged communiqué about Fidel Castro and suddenly the laboratory results are back:

Yep. Leftism. We found it in the tissue sample.

This is the asymmetry that bothers the Dude.

Not that JVL is wrong about DSA.

Not that the Never Trump right has failed to condemn MAGA. Quite the opposite. The Bulwark crowd has spent a decade telling Republicans that Trumpism is authoritarian, corrupt, dangerous and fundamentally incompatible with the conservatism they thought they belonged to.

They lost friends over it.

Careers.

Institutions.

A political home.

The Dude gives them credit for that.

But there is a little intellectual trick hiding in the rubble.

When extremism appears on their side, it is an aberration from the tradition.

When extremism appears on the other side, it reveals the tradition.

That dog will not hunt, man.

There’s a Board in Your Eye, Walter

Take Christian nationalism.

You can argue all day about definitions, and you should be careful with the term because it gets thrown around too casually.

But PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas classified 21 percent of Republicans as Christian-nationalist “Adherents” and another 35 percent as “Sympathizers.” The second category is broad and does not mean 56 percent of Republicans are itching to establish Gilead on Tuesday.

Still.

Fifty-six percent is an awfully fucking large “fringe.”

And then there’s the small matter of the actual Republican Party platform.

Not the Proud Boys newsletter.

Not something Alex Jones wrote on a cocktail napkin.

The Republican National Committee.

Its current platform is explicitly Trump’s platform. The RNC described it that way when adopting it. It promises, among other things, the largest deportation operation in American history, describes migration as an “invasion,” promises to deport “pro-Hamas radicals,” alleges political persecution by Democrats, and builds the entire document around Trump’s political project.

You are perfectly entitled to support some of those policies.

You are perfectly entitled to oppose them.

But what you cannot plausibly say is:

Those people are merely hanging around the Republican coalition.

My brother in Christ, they wrote the platform.

This is the part that makes the DSA panic a little strange.

Because the DSA has not captured the Democratic Party.

MAGA has captured the Republican Party.

One organization has a little over 100,000 members and periodically gives Democratic leadership heartburn.

The other one has the White House.

The Old House Was Lovely, Man

And this is where the Dude has some sympathy.

The Never Trump conservatives remember the old house.

They remember Buckley chasing the Birchers out.

They remember NATO and free trade and institutionalism and constitutional restraint and earnest conversations about marginal tax rates.

There were leather chairs.

Somebody had a Scotch.

George Will was explaining baseball.

Then they went out for cigarettes and came home ten years later and Donald Trump was in the living room tearing copper wire out of the walls while Steve Bannon tried to start a trash fire in the kitchen sink.

That has to suck.

And if you spent your life believing that house was American conservatism, there is an understandable desire to say:

These people stole it. They aren’t us.

Maybe so.

But eventually possession becomes relevant.

At some point the squatters have the deed, the utilities are in their name and the old owners are standing on the sidewalk arguing about the original floor plan.

You don’t get to compare the Democratic Party as it actually exists to the Republican Party you remember from 1996.

The Mote

The Dude vaguely remembers a Bible story about this.

Something about a mote and a beam.

Walter says it was Ecclesiastes.

It was not Ecclesiastes.

Donny probably knew.

The point was basically this:

Before you become extremely interested in extracting the tiny object from someone else’s eye, you might want to deal with the Home Depot lumber aisle protruding from your own face.

And yes, the DSA mote is real.

Some of it is nasty.

Some of it is stupid.

Democrats should have absolutely no difficulty saying that Castro apologism is bullshit, authoritarian regimes are bad even when they dislike America, Putin owns Putin’s invasion, and every geopolitical event does not become morally clearer when you run it through a graduate seminar on American imperialism.

Tell them to knock it off.

Tell them they’re wrong.

Tell them to fuck off when appropriate.

That is what healthy political coalitions are supposed to do with their fringes.

And you know who ought to recognize that practice better than anybody?

Never Trump conservatives.

They have spent the last decade begging Republicans to do precisely this.

So by all means, JVL, bring the tweezers.

The Dude will hold the flashlight.

We can get that mote.

But afterward?

Walter, man.

We really need to talk about the fucking board sticking out of your eye.

You’re dripping on the lane man.

Look, man, I’ve been thinking. And I know what you’re thinking—The Dude? Thinking?—but hear me out. I’ve been mainlining British police procedurals lately. Luther. Line of Duty. Unforgotten. Great shows. Great coats. But here’s what I keep noticing: every five minutes, somebody’s pulling up CCTV footage. Street corner cameras. Shop cameras. Traffic cameras. Cameras on cameras. London’s got something like a million of these things. One camera for every ten people. That’s not a city, man. That’s a casino.

And I’m watching this, sipping my Caucasian, and I’m like, at least they know they’re being watched. The Brits put up a sign. “CCTV in Operation.” Smile for the lens. It’s overt. It’s statutory. It’s the devil you know, and he’s wearing a hi-vis vest and drinking tea.

But then I look out my own window—well, my former window, before the landlord situation got complicated—and I realize we don’t have that here. We’ve got something way sneakier. We’ve got the invisible panopticon. And it’s not run by the government. It’s run by guys in Patagonia vests who say “disrupt” a lot.

The UK: Big Brother, But Make It Parliamentary

So here’s the deal with Britain, man. They’ve got roughly 13,000 ANPR cameras—those automatic license plate readers—hooked into a national data center. Sixty million plate reads a day. Your car drives through London, they know what you had for breakfast. It’s all governed by something called the Protection of Freedoms Act, which sounds like a prog-rock album but is actually a law. There’s oversight. There’s an Information Commissioner. There’s signage.

But—and this is the part the TV shows don’t tell you—most of those cameras aren’t even government-owned. The ratio of private to public CCTV in the UK is like seventy to one. Seventy! So when Detective Chief Inspector Gruff Voice pulls up footage of the suspect at Tesco, he’s not accessing some Orwellian state archive. He’s asking a grocery store for their tapes. Just like a cop in Milwaukee would do, except the Brits have better accents and more rain.

The UK model is centralized, statutory, and—here’s the key word—legible. You can look it up. Parliament debated it. There are white papers. It’s transparent in the sense that you know the camera exists, you know who runs it, and if they misuse it, there’s theoretically someone to complain to. Is it creepy? Sure, man. Is it at least honest about being creepy? Also sure.

The US: Big Brother, But Make It a SaaS Subscription

Now come back across the pond, man. We don’t have a million government cameras on every corner. What we’ve got is Flock Safety. And Ring. And Nest. And a bunch of other cloud-connected snitches that we voluntarily bolted to our houses because we were worried about porch pirates.

Flock Safety has 120,000 license plate reader cameras in 49 states. Six thousand police departments use them. And here’s where it gets really un-Dude: these cameras aren’t owned by the cities. They’re owned by Flock. A private company. A startup. And they’ve built a “National Lookup” feature that lets a cop in Texas search license plates across the entire country—including in states that have laws against exactly that kind of thing.

Let me say that again, man, because I had to read it twice myself and I was sober for at least one of those times: a private company built a nationwide surveillance network, and they rent it to police departments like it’s Netflix. Except instead of recommending you watch The Big Lebowski for the eighth time, it recommends which woman to stalk.

The Texas Thing, Man. The Texas Thing.

So there’s this case, right? Johnson County, Texas. Sheriff’s deputy opens up Flock and types—get this—“had an abortion, search for female.” That’s the search query. That’s it. That’s the whole warrant. That’s the whole probable cause. “Had an abortion, search for female.”

And Flock? Flock says, sure thing, buddy. That single query hit 6,809 networks. Eighty-three thousand cameras. Across nearly the entire country. Including Illinois. Including Washington. States where abortion is legal and where local laws explicitly say you can’t use surveillance data to track people for this exact reason.

But here’s the kicker, man: the Illinois police departments didn’t even know their data was being accessed. There was no data-sharing agreement. No judicial review. No phone call saying, Hey, Texas is using your cameras to hunt a pregnant lady, that cool? It just happened. Because Flock’s central server said it was fine.

And I’m sitting here, man, with my White Russian getting warm, and I’m thinking: at least when the UK tracks you, Parliament had to vote on it. When Flock tracks you, some product manager in Atlanta had to approve the feature rollout. Which is worse? I genuinely don’t know, man. But one of them involved elected representatives and the other involved a Jira ticket.

The Abuse Reel: Cops Using the Toy for the Wrong Game

And it’s not just the abortion thing. It’s not just politics. It’s personal. It’s creepy. It’s guys with badges and logins using this stuff to stalk their exes, their crushes, their ex-wives’ new boyfriends. The documented cases are piling up like empty beer cans.

There was a police chief in Georgia who got arrested for using ALPRs to stalk multiple people. Died by suicide before trial. A Milwaukee officer ran his girlfriend’s plate—and her ex-boyfriend’s plate—over 170 times in two months. A North Carolina cop ran her boyfriend’s ex-wife’s plate 31 times, including while she was off-duty, and typed fake reasons into the system. A Wisconsin chief installed a surveillance camera outside his own house during a divorce because the city attorney told him not to, and he did it anyway, telling staff to keep it “low key.”

Low key, man. He said low key.

Flock’s own audit logs—obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation—show hundreds of searches tied to political protests. Searches targeting Romani people using ethnic slurs. Immigration enforcement in sanctuary states. And Flock’s response? Their CEO announced that audit tools, previously optional and used by about one-third of agencies, would now be mandatory. Wow. Mandatory audits. What a concept. It’s like if I said I was going to start maybe paying rent, and my landlord was supposed to be grateful.

Ring and Nest: The Snitches in Your Foyer

And we haven’t even talked about the doorbells, man. Amazon Ring. Google Nest. Millions of these things. Cloud-connected. Always recording. And both companies reserve the right to hand your footage to police without a warrant if they decide it’s an “emergency.”

Amazon’s done it eleven times that they’ve admitted to. Google says they haven’t done it yet, but they’ve got the seat reserved, like a guy holding a spot at the bar for a friend who might show up. The legal basis is the Stored Communications Act, which says they can do this. Not that they must. They just… do. No judge. No warrant. Often no notification to the homeowner. Just a cop filling out a form on Amazon’s website, and Bezos’s server farm says, yeah, here’s the video of your neighbor walking his dog at 3 AM.

I don’t even have a doorbell, man. I’ve got a piece of cardboard that says “No Solicitors” and a Louisville Slugger. It’s low-tech. It’s analog. But at least Jeff Bezos can’t subpoena my bat.

So Which System Sucks Less? A Comparative Analysis Nobody Asked For

Here’s where the stoner philosophy kicks in, man. The UK system is centralized, statutory, and visible. It’s creepy, but it’s honest creepy. There’s a law. There’s a commissioner. There’s a sign on the wall that says you’re on camera. When Parliament expands surveillance powers, the newspapers write about it. People get mad. It’s part of the civic discourse.

The US system is fragmented, privatized, and invisible. It’s built by vendors, not voters. A Texas deputy can bypass Illinois law because a private company in Atlanta built a nationwide search tool and called it “community safety.” We’ve created a surveillance state without ever passing a surveillance law. We just bought it at Best Buy and signed the terms of service.

The UK’s weakness is normalization. People accept it because it’s official. It’s the water they swim in. The US’s weakness is that we’ve built something worse—a national surveillance infrastructure with none of the constitutional safeguards that are supposed to make this country special. The Fourth Amendment says you need a warrant. But the Fourth Amendment was written before cloud-connected doorbell cameras and venture-capital-funded license plate networks. The cops don’t need to violate the Constitution if Amazon will just hand them the tape.

The Convergence: We’re All Bowlers in the Same League

And here’s the really depressing part, man. We’re converging. The UK is privatizing—seventy private cameras for every public one. The US is nationalizing through vendors—Flock’s “National Lookup” is basically a shadow national police database. Both countries are slapping AI and facial recognition on top of existing infrastructure. Both are seeing oversight weakened—Britain through proposed reforms that would gut the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, America through the simple absence of any comprehensive federal privacy law.

It doesn’t matter if the camera on the pole says “Metropolitan Police” or “Flock Safety.” What matters is the architecture. What matters is that one person with a login can track another person’s movements across state lines, across public and private space, without a warrant and without meaningful consequence.

The Dude abides, man. But The Dude abides privately. And right now, privacy is like my rug—someone’s already pissed on it, and nobody’s offering to replace it.

The White Russian Epilogue

I’m not saying tear it all down, man. I’m not saying cops shouldn’t have tools to solve crimes. Find the stolen Camry. Find the missing kid. That’s good. That’s abiding.

But if you need eighty-three thousand cameras to do it—cameras owned by a private company, searchable by any cop with a badge and a grudge, across state lines, without a warrant, without judicial review, without even notifying the local police departments whose data you’re stealing—then maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the Camry.

Maybe the problem is you’ve built a surveillance state and called it a parking app.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a White Russian getting warm. And unlike my front porch, nobody’s filming it.

The Dude abides. But he’s keeping the bat handy.

Last time out, the Dude worked through whether Donald Trump is the Mule from Asimov’s Foundation, and ran into a wall.

The Mule is a mutation. An accident. Nothing in galactic history produced him or saw him coming. He is an asteroid.

Trump is not an asteroid.

So we need a different metaphor, and the Dude has one. It has the advantage of having actually happened.

But first there’s a smaller correction to make, and it isn’t political.

It’s chemical.

(sorry, this gets a little long, but it’s worth it)

Gasoline Is The Wrong Word

People say Trump poured gasoline on the Republican Party.

Gasoline is fuel.

Trump was never the fuel.

Picture a Weber kettle. Not one of those enormous stainless-steel outdoor kitchens with six burners, a Bluetooth thermometer and a payment schedule. A Weber. Black. Charcoal.

Somebody has spent decades stacking briquettes in there. Some are glowing. Some are smoking. A few flames flicker around the edge.

Then a guy walks onto the patio carrying a Dewar flask of liquid oxygen.

Someone says, “You probably shouldn’t pour that on there.”

He pours it on there.

WHOOOOOOOMPH.

That, man. That’s much closer.

And Somebody Actually Did This

Here’s the part that elevates this from a metaphor to a documented incident.

In the mid-nineties, a Purdue engineer named George Goble got tired of waiting for charcoal to light.

He started with a hair dryer. Escalated to a vacuum cleaner. Then a propane torch. Then an acetylene torch. Then compressed pure oxygen, because engineers are a specific kind of person and the annual picnic had long since stopped being about hamburgers.

Then he went to liquid oxygen. Yeah, the same stuff they use in rockets…

Three gallons of it. Onto sixty pounds of charcoal.

Forty of those pounds were gone in three seconds. The grill was ready to cook in three seconds. All the old grease burned off. There is video. It looks like a small municipal emergency.

He won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, which is the correct outcome.

Now Read The Warning He Published With It

Slowly, man. This is the whole thesis, hiding inside a barbecue tip:

An ignition source, such as a lit cigarette or one glowing coal, must be present before pouring on the LOX.

You need a coal already lit.

Liquid oxygen poured on cold charcoal does nothing impressive. It sits there being extremely cold, boils off into the sky, and everybody goes home having wasted three gallons of liquid oxygen and an afternoon.

LOX is an oxidizer. It does not burn. It makes other things burn absurdly faster.

Which means the great unanswerable question of the last decade — did Trump cause this, or did this cause Trump — collapses into a much smaller question with a much more uncomfortable answer.

Who lit the coal.

The Charcoal Was Already There

The laziest available account of Donald Trump imagines a perfectly respectable Republican Party quietly grilling hamburgers and discussing entitlement reform until a deranged television personality arrived with a flamethrower.

Come on man.

The charcoal had been stacked for fifty years.

Goldwater. The Southern Strategy. The Religious Right. Reagan explaining that government is the problem. Gingrich converting Congress from a legislature into a blood sport. Limbaugh. Fox. The Clinton conspiracy cottage industry. Iraq. Palin. The Tea Party. Birtherism. Thirty years of escalating insistence that Democrats weren’t merely wrong but illegitimate, and that journalists, universities, scientists and civil servants were an occupying army.

Republican voters did not wake up one morning in June 2015 and spontaneously arrive at all that.

There was already a fire, man.

Trump changed the rate at which it burned.

Share

Walter Objects To The Cooking Metaphor

“This wasn’t an accident,” Walter says. “These people built the fucking thing.”

Walter is now wearing a barbecue apron.

Nobody saw him put it on.

And, well — yes. That’s exactly why oxidizer works better than gasoline. It’s the distinction that lets both halves of the argument be true at once, which is why everybody’s been arguing past each other since 2016.

Trump didn’t invent evangelical grievance. Or racial resentment. Or hostility to immigration. Or anti-government conservatism. Or right-wing media. Or the conviction that liberals are enemies rather than opponents.

He inherited all of it. Fully assembled. Some of it still under warranty.

What he contributed was noticing that the valve turned further than anyone had turned it, and that nothing bad happened to him when he turned it there. That it went to eleven man.

Which Brings Us To The Bowling League

Walter once pulled a firearm on a man over a foot fault.

Insane. Indefensible. Also — and this is the part everybody skips — completely committed to the league.

Walter wants there to be rules. He wants a scoresheet, a season, a tournament, a Wednesday night. The entire deranged episode is in service of an institution he needs to keep existing. This is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

That was movement conservatism for fifty years. Furious, escalating, occasionally armed, and fundamentally invested in the league continuing to exist.

They wanted the anger instrumentally. Angry enough to vote. Angry enough to back the tax cut. Angry enough to confirm the judges. Angry enough to show up in a midterm.

But you still needed the Senate to function. You needed the Chamber of Commerce. You needed NATO. You needed the FBI, at least on alternate Tuesdays. You needed a bureaucracy that would operate the machinery once you’d won it. You needed elections that produced results you could take office under.

You wanted the voters angry.

You did not want them that angry.

Trump’s contribution — and the Dude does think it counts as one, in the way a hurricane counts as weather — was asking why not.

Why not tell them the whole thing is rigged? Why not tell them the experts are lying? Why not tell them an election you lost was stolen? Why not go after Republicans who cross you harder than you go after Democrats? Why not make loyalty to one guy the only test that scores?

Why keep the fire inside the grill?

The patio’s right there, man.

Donny Has A Question

“So what happens when the oxygen runs out?”

Not now, Donny.

“I’m just saying, it’s a gas, right? Doesn’t it boil off? Doesn’t it just —”

Donny, you’re out of your element.

Hold that thought. Seriously. Hold it.

Maude Explains Oxidizers

Liquid oxygen does not need to be the combustible material in order to make combustion spectacularly more violent.

Thank you, Maude.

Maude would also like to note, clinically, that the resulting coalition was never a monolith and isn’t one now.

YouGov finds ninety-five percent of MAGA-identifying Republicans approving of Trump’s job performance — sixty-eight percent of them strongly. Among non-MAGA Republicans, approval sits around fifty-four percent, with eight percent strongly approving and forty-three percent disapproving outright.

Those are two different parties sharing a jersey.

Global Strategy Group found a sixty-six-point gap between MAGA and non-MAGA Republican voters on the basic question of whether the economy is getting better or worse. Sixty-six points. Same party. Same country. Same groceries.

And More in Common, after canvassing more than eighteen thousand Americans including some eleven thousand Trump voters, ended up sorting them into four distinct clusters rather than one. A coalition, not a cult.

Which is why “Trump destroyed the Republican Party” is simultaneously true and misleading. He destroyed one version of it, using material that was already sitting there for another. The resentment. The religious grievance. The anti-institutional politics. The sealed information environment. The conviction that compromise equals surrender.

He didn’t manufacture any of it.

He gave it permission. Then amplification. Then coordination. Then a red hat.

One More Thing From Goble’s Warning Label

There’s a second line, and the Dude has been chewing on it for a while.

If charcoal is PRESOAKED in LOX first, an explosion will result. One briquette presoaked in LOX is approximately equivalent to one stick of dynamite.

Pour the oxidizer on top of burning material and you get a fast fire.

Let the material sit submerged in it first — saturated, all the way through, for a long time — and you don’t get a fire at all.

You get a detonation.

The Dude doesn’t want to over-drive this one. But somewhere in America there are people who have spent fifteen years marinating in an information environment that contains no oxygen but its own, and the Dude does not think those people are on the same curve as everybody else.

That’s not a joke, man. Moving on.

The Big Lebowski Discovers He Has No Money

Here’s the genuinely funny part, and the Dude apologizes for enjoying it as much as he does.

Republican elites spent forty years telling their voters a very specific story. Government is corrupt. The media lies. Experts are frauds. Liberals hate you. Washington is a swamp. The establishment sold you out.

Then Trump showed up and said: correct on every count, and also, the Republican establishment telling you this is the establishment.

Oh.

Huh.

They spent four decades training millions of people to distrust every institution in American life and then discovered, over roughly one primary season, that they were an institution.

And look — the movie already did this bit.

The Big Lebowski sits in his study surrounded by plaques and photographs and framed evidence of his own importance, and delivers the greatest line of establishment contempt in American cinema. Your revolution is over. Condolences. The bums lost.

Enormous authority. Tremendous conviction. Beautiful room.

And it’s all Maude’s money. Every dollar. The achievements are invented, the foundation is a tax vehicle, the briefcase is empty, and when somebody finally yanks him out of the chair he just lies there on the floor.

Forty years of telling the base that real Americans built this country while running an operation funded by donors who wanted a capital gains rate. Then the base took the story seriously and went looking for the guy who’d been laughing at them.

They found him. He was in the chair.

You can hear the charcoal catching.

The Thermodynamics Of It

This is why Trump is both cause and consequence, and why arguing about which is a waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

You cannot explain him without the preceding half-century. But you also cannot subtract him and assume the reaction proceeds at the same speed, because reaction rate is not a detail. Past a certain rate, it stops being a faster version of the same event and starts being a different event.

Politicians adapted. Donors adapted. Media adapted. Activists adapted. Primary electorates adapted.

People who couldn’t tolerate the heat left, mostly for cable contracts and book deals. People who thrived in it moved closer to the flame.

And several years later somebody looks up from the potato salad and says: when the hell did this become an inferno?

Man. You poured liquid oxygen on the barbecue. In daylight. In front of witnesses. Somebody filmed it.

So, The Mule

Which is the correction the Foundation analogy needed.

Trump is Mule-like in the narrow sense that an unusual individual dramatically altered the trajectory of a system that assumed individuals didn’t matter that much.

But Asimov’s Mule came from outside history. This guy came from inside the grill.

Movement conservatives stacked the charcoal. The Religious Right added a layer. Talk radio added another. Fox kept the coals hot. Gingrich wandered around with the lighter fluid. The Tea Party brought one of those chimney starters.

Then a guy walked onto the patio, looked at the container marked LIQUID OXYGEN — KEEP AWAY FROM OPEN FLAME, and thought:

Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

WHOOOOOOOMPH.

Donny Was Right, Which Is Its Own Kind Of Tragedy

Liquid oxygen boils off. Donny had it exactly right and nobody let him finish. It’s gone in minutes.

The charcoal does not care.

The charcoal is now sixty pounds of open flame and it will go on being that for hours after the oxidizer has evaporated into the Indiana sky. You don’t get the cold grill back. You don’t get the eyebrows back either.

So when people ask what the Republican Party looks like after Trump, the Dude thinks they’re asking a comforting question with real sincerity. The answer isn’t it returns to normal. The answer is: it looks like whatever burns at that temperature.

Some of it will be recognizable. The load-bearing stuff mostly won’t.

The Dude would love to be wrong about this. The Dude is frequently wrong. It’s kind of his thing.

But nobody’s getting a new rug out of it, man. That’s not how the story goes.

The Dude abides.

The eyebrows do not.

Now California’s a peculiar kind of place, and I don’t mind sayin’ so.

Folks come out here to invent themselves. Always have. Fella arrives with nothin’ but a good jaw and a way of talkin’, and if the light hits him right, why, he can be anything he says he is. Sometimes that’s a beautiful thing. Sometimes it ain’t.

And it happens there were two Lebowskis in this story. One of ‘em built somethin’. The other one stood in the middle of it, in a real nice suit, tellin’ folks how hard he’d worked.

I’ll let the Dude take it from here. He was there, more or less.

Brandt Would Like to Show You Around

So Brandt’s giving me the tour, and I gotta say, the man is thrilled.

Here’s the Master Plan of 1960, sir. Three tiers, community colleges and state colleges and the university, everybody who can do the work gets a seat. Here’s the water project. Here’s the freeway system. Here’s — and Brandt does a little thing with his hands here — here’s the university system, sir, more Nobel laureates than any public institution on the face of the earth.

Here’s the periodic table, sir. Berkelium. Californium. Lawrencium. Seaborgium. Four boxes on the wall of every chemistry classroom on this planet, and they’ve all got California on them, and one of them is literally named after the school.

And it was free, sir. Tuition free, for any kid in this state who could hack it. Written down and reaffirmed and everything.

And I’m nodding along, man, because it is impressive. That’s an actual civilization somebody built out of a desert and a lot of arguing.

Then I go: hey Brandt, so which of this stuff did he do?

And Brandt does that laugh. You know the one. The little nervous one that isn’t really a laugh so much as a door closing politely in your face. Ha ha ha! Well, sir. Mr. Reagan has been a tremendous steward —

Right. Sure. Steward. Got it.

Because none of it was his. Pat Brown built the water and the freeways. Clark Kerr and a legislature built the Master Plan. Ernest Lawrence1 built the cyclotron and a generation of chemists filled in the bottom of the periodic table, and the whole apparatus was paid for by every poor bastard in California who ever bought a gallon of gas.

Reagan showed up in 1967 and inherited a functioning machine he had not designed, built, funded, or so much as visited. And then he went to war with the people using it.

Share

Walter Has Been Reading About the Regents Meeting

“Three weeks.”

Walter, buddy—

“THREE WEEKS, Dude. He takes the oath in January of ‘67 and three weeks later he walks into his first Board of Regents meeting and Clark Kerr is FIRED. Same room. Same day. Chronicle called it a big victory for Reagan, which — thank you, at least somebody was writing it down.2”

“And you want to know the part that makes my eye do the thing? During the campaign he was in regular contact with the Bureau about Kerr. About the PRESIDENT of the university system. Because Kerr wouldn’t come down on the students the way Hoover wanted. That’s not a policy disagreement, Dude. Nobody fires the head of a university system over a policy disagreement three weeks into the job. That’s a hit. He campaigned on a hit and then he made good on it before he’d found the fucking bathrooms.”

He did also propose a budget cut and a tuition charge at the same meeting.

“Am I wrong?”

You’re not wrong.

“And then — and I need you to be sitting down for this one — when Berkeley says we can’t absorb that cut, his people float the idea that maybe the university could sell off its RARE BOOK COLLECTION. The books, Dude. Hock the incunabula. That’s the plan. That’s a governor of California looking at the greatest public research university in the world and seeing a pawn shop.”

He also shut down all twenty-eight UC and Cal State campuses in May of 1970. Every one of them. During Cambodia.

“...Every campus.”

Every campus, man.

“That’s not education policy. That’s an occupation.”

The Quiet Part, Out Loud, in a Newspaper

Okay, so here’s where I gotta drop the bit for a minute.

October 29th, 1970. Reagan’s up for reelection, six days out. His education adviser, a Hoover economist named Roger Freeman on loan from the Nixon administration, gives a press conference to defend the record. The Chronicle runs it the next morning under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education,” which is a hell of a headline.

And what Freeman says is that “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.” That this is dynamite. That they need to be selective about who gets to go through.

That’s the argument, man. Not the budget. Not the deficit. Not fiscal prudence, not belt-tightening, not any of the language they used in public. The actual objection was that education had gotten cheap enough that the wrong people were getting it, and educated people who are annoyed about things are difficult to govern.

Price as a filter. Not a side effect of the policy. The point of the policy.

And I’ll give you the complicated part, because Maude would make me anyway. Freeman also said his reference point was Germany, and that he’d watched it happen. He was born in Vienna in 1904 and got out after Hitler. So this wasn’t some country club reactionary — this was a man who had personally seen a society come apart and concluded from it that the danger was too many educated people with nothing to do.

He watched fascism up close and came away thinking the problem was the professors.

Motherfucker.

Maude Runs the Ledger

“The system he considered a discipline problem is the one that produced the outcome he benefited from.”

She doesn’t look up. She never looks up.

“Tuition-free public education produced the Nobel run, the national laboratories, and the trained technical population that built the state’s postwar economy. That economy produced the property values. In 1978 the property taxes on those values were capped, which removed the revenue base underneath the system that had generated them in the first place. The snake, and so forth.”

Okay but he didn’t actually get tuition though, right? Legislature blocked him.

“Correct, and you should say so in print before somebody says it for you. He fought for tuition at the four-year institutions and the Legislature refused him. What happened instead is that in 1970 the Regents imposed a hundred-and-fifty-dollar ‘educational fee’ — and a state senator named Rodda said at the time, on the record, that this was tuition with a different word on it. The fee language then persisted for decades while the number climbed.”

“He lost the vote and won the argument. Which is the more durable of the two. Policies get repealed. Premises do not.”

And that’s the tell, isn’t it. When an institution has to lie to you about what it’s charging you for, the fight’s already over. Nobody euphemizes a principle they still hold.

The Man on the Wall

I want to tell you about a guy.

Kid goes to UCLA, then Berkeley, on the cheap, because that’s what those places were for. By 28 he’s discovered plutonium. Over his career his group turns up ten transuranium elements and he reorganizes the bottom of the periodic table into the shape you’ve been looking at your whole life without knowing whose idea it was. Nobel Prize at 39. Chancellor of Berkeley. Then a decade running the Atomic Energy Commission under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, working the Limited Test Ban Treaty along the way.

Element 106 is named seaborgium. They did it while he was still alive, which had never been done, and there was a real fight about whether you’re allowed to.

Glenn Seaborg is what the free system produced. He is the single most complete refutation of Roger Freeman’s entire argument that has ever drawn breath. An educated proletarian who ended up putting his own name on the periodic table and then spending ten years trying to keep everybody from being vaporized.

In 1983 he sat on the commission that produced A Nation at Risk — the report announcing that American education was in crisis. He’s right there on the signature page. University Professor of Chemistry and Nobel Laureate.

I don’t have a joke for that one. I’ve been trying for a week.

Donny

“Who paid for the cyclotron?”

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

Everybody, Donny. Everybody paid for the cyclotron.

Condolences

Here’s the thing I can’t get past.

In 1986, Reagan spoke at a scholarship dinner for Eureka College, the little school in Illinois he went to. It’s on the record. It’s in his own library.

He says his family couldn’t pay for the schooling. Says they lived close enough to the tracks to hear the whistles. Says he worked every summer and saved every dollar and it still wasn’t enough — so the college covered the rest with a scholarship, and campus jobs, and by letting him defer part of his tuition until after graduation. Says they did it for a number of other kids too. In the depths of the Depression.

The college took a chance on him.

Now go back to how he defended the California tuition plan. He said tuition had to be accompanied by adequate loans, to be paid back after graduation3.

Same deal, man. The exact same deal. Study now, settle up later.

Except when Eureka did it, an institution absorbed the risk because it decided a kid was worth it. And what he wanted for California was that shape with a lender wedged into the middle of it and nobody taking a chance on anybody at all. He got a gift and proposed a product.

Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost.

Said by a man who never lost anything, in a room he didn’t build, to people who were paying for the room.

Now the Dude, he takes the long view on account of he don’t have much choice.

That fella won. I ain’t gonna pretty it up for you. Every tuition bill in this state runs downhill from one meetin’ in January of ‘67, and there’s a whole generation payin’ on somethin’ a man decided when they were nowhere near born.

But them four little boxes are still on the wall. Berkelium. Californium. Lawrencium. Seaborgium. Ain’t nobody takin’ ‘em down, ain’t nobody sellin’ ‘em off with the rare books. Some kid in a chemistry class in Fresno is lookin’ right at ‘em this mornin’ and don’t know a damn thing about any of this.

Which I suppose is its own kind of abidin’.

The Dude has been reading science fiction.

This is not especially unusual. There are only so many hours a man can bowl, and eventually you find yourself horizontal at home with a White Russian and an Isaac Asimov paperback whose cover features a gigantic spaceship hovering over something that looks suspiciously like the Chrysler Building on Tatooine.

Foundation, man.

Good shit.

The premise, for those of you who spent your formative years doing healthier things: a mathematician named Hari Seldon invents psychohistory.

Psychohistory cannot tell you whether Larry from Sector Seven is having the chicken or the fish on Tuesday. Individuals are noise. What it predicts is the behavior of enormous populations across enormous stretches of time. Empires. Revolutions. Civilizational collapse. And it’s right.

Seldon runs the numbers and has some bad news.

The Galactic Empire is fucked.

He can’t prevent the collapse. Nobody can. What he can do is compress the ensuing dark age from something like thirty thousand years down to about a thousand.

Still a shitty millennium. But take the win, man.

So Seldon builds a Plan.

And for a few hundred years, the Plan works. Crisis after crisis arrives right on schedule and resolves exactly the way the math said it would. People stop worrying. Why wouldn’t they? The future has been notarized.

Then the Mule shows up.

Walter Has Read This Book

Walter puts down his bowling ball.

This is never a good sign.

“The problem,” Walter says, “is that psychohistory assumes individual actors are statistically irrelevant.”

Walter has apparently been waiting four decades for somebody to bring up Asimov in his presence.

The Dude takes a drink. “Okay, Walter.”

“The Mule violates the assumptions of the fucking model, Dude.”

Annoyingly, Walter is right.

The Mule is not just another warlord. Seldon’s equations already account for warlords. Empires come with warlords the way bowling alleys come with a guy who has his own shoes and strong opinions about them.

The Mule is different because he is a mutant who can reach into a human mind and rearrange the emotional furniture.

Fear. Loyalty. Despair. Devotion.

One individual with enough leverage over enough people that the assumptions underneath the entire model quietly stop being true.

And this is where the Dude, several inches into a White Russian and possibly one other thing, had an uncomfortable thought.

Donald Trump is kind of the Mule.

Not literally.

Share

Donald Trump Cannot Control Your Brain

“Wait,” Donny says. “Trump has psychic powers?”

No, Donny.

But here’s the thing worth knowing, and it’s the part everybody skips when they reach for this analogy: the Mule does not broadcast.

He doesn’t hypnotize a galaxy. He works one person at a time, and only the people who matter. Generals. Ministers. Administrators. Asimov calls it Conversion, and the horrifying detail — the detail that makes the books stick to your ribs — is that a Converted man keeps everything.

His intelligence. His competence. His memory. His whole personality, more or less intact.

He just cannot bring himself to oppose the Mule. Ever. About anything. He is exactly the man he always was, minus the capacity for resistance, and he will explain his own devotion to you at length in complete, articulate sentences.

Now.

The Dude is not saying anything happened to anybody’s brain.

The Dude is only saying that in January 2021, ten House Republicans voted to impeach Donald Trump. Four retired rather than face a primary. Four were beaten by Trump-endorsed challengers. By late 2025, two were left, and one of those two — Dan Newhouse, who had beaten Trump-backed challengers twice — announced he was going home with, in his words, no reservations or remorse.

That leaves David Valadao, currently the last one standing, and we’ll see about that.

Seven Republican senators voted to convict. Three remain.

Ten to one. Seven to three. Five years.

You don’t need mutant powers, man. You need a primary electorate and a lot of patience.

There Were Rules. Or Everybody Thought There Were.

American politics rolled into 2016 hauling an enormous collection of assumptions that everyone treated as laws of nature.

Parties control their nominations. Scandals damage politicians. Republican voters care about deficits. Evangelicals care about personal morality. Insulting prisoners of war is disqualifying. Attacking your own party’s leadership carries a price. Losing a presidential election means you’re no longer president. Trying to overturn one complicates the comeback tour.

There were rules, man.

Trump walked through them like the velvet rope outside the bowling alley bar — the one nobody has ever unhooked, that everybody walks around anyway, that is functionally a suggestion made of nylon.

And the remarkable thing was not that he broke the rules.

It was watching everyone discover how many of them were never rules.

They were conventions. Norms. Expectations. Things nobody did because everybody believed the price would be unbearable.

Trump started checking the tags.

Turns out a lot of it was on clearance.

Because here’s the part that should have been obvious and wasn’t: most of those prices were denominated in shame. And shame is the one currency where the transaction requires the customer’s consent. You cannot charge a man who declines to be embarrassed. The entire enforcement mechanism of American political life turned out to run on a payment system that only works if the guy at the register agrees it’s real.

Once one person demonstrates that the forbidden thing is survivable, it isn’t forbidden anymore. It’s just unusual. Then it’s a tactic. Then it’s Tuesday.

Maude Has A Correction, And It’s A Big One

Maude has arrived.

This is unfortunate, because Maude has facts.

“The Mule,” she says, “is an exogenous disturbance.”

The Dude looks at Walter. Walter looks at the Dude. Nobody is entirely certain whether “exogenous” is a bowling term.

But she’s right, and it’s the load-bearing objection.

The Mule is a mutation. An accident. Nothing in the preceding history of the galaxy produced him or predicted him. He is an asteroid.

Donald Trump is not an asteroid. Trump was assembled on the premises, over decades, by people who are still walking around giving interviews about how surprised they are. The Religious Right. Talk radio. Gingrich. Fox. The Tea Party. Birtherism. Thirty years of escalating rhetoric about how Democrats aren’t wrong so much as illegitimate.

So the analogy has a hard limit, and the limit matters, because treating Trump as an inexplicable freak accident quietly excuses every single person who poured the foundation and paved the runway.

The Dude has a whole separate rant about this involving a barbecue and three gallons of liquid oxygen. Another time.

Because there’s a piece of this that survives Maude’s objection completely intact, and it’s the piece nobody wants to look at.

We Were The Ones With The Plan

Everybody wants to argue about whether Trump is the Mule.

Nobody wants to ask who we are in this story.

Man, we’re the Foundation. And the defining characteristic of the Foundation, across several books, is not courage or ingenuity. It’s complacency.

They know the Plan exists. They know it’s mathematically sound. So they stop straining. Every time a crisis arrives, some reasonable person stands up and explains that Seldon anticipated this, that the resolution is already baked in, that the correct posture is patience. History is on our side. The math says so. Relax.

Then a guy shows up who wasn’t in the math, and it turns out several generations of relaxing has consequences.

Now count how many times you heard this one:

The Republican establishment will stop him. The primary voters will stop him. The convention will stop him. The general election will stop him. Mueller will stop him. Impeachment will stop him. The second impeachment will stop him. The courts will stop him. The bureaucracy will stop him. The generals will stop him. The market will stop him. The midterms will stop him.

Surely this will stop him.

That’s not analysis, man. That’s a Seldon Plan. That is the specific belief that the system contains a hidden mechanism that resolves crises on your behalf while you wait.

Some institutions held. Some bent. Some folded like a cheap second-hand lawn chair.

But the assumption underneath all of it was that institutions have agency.

They don’t. People inside institutions do.

A rule constrains somebody only when a specific human being decides to enforce it and accepts what enforcement costs them. Norms are not laws of physics. They’re a bunch of people all agreeing, continuously and at personal expense, to keep doing something inconvenient.

The Constitution does not climb out of the National Archives at night carrying a baseball bat.

And Asimov Knew It, Which Is The Part That Kills Me

Here’s the detail that makes the whole comparison worth the trouble.

Seldon didn’t actually believe in a self-executing plan either.

He built a second Foundation. A hidden one. Its entire job — its only job, across a thousand years — is to sit there in the dark, watch the Plan drift, and shove it back into alignment by hand. Over and over. Forever. Unrecognized, unthanked, and mostly unnoticed by the people they’re saving.

Even in the fictional universe with the actual working equations, the math didn’t run itself.

It needed a maintenance crew.

America does not have a Second Foundation. There is no room of quiet mentalists making small corrections while you sleep. There are election clerks. County judges. Inspectors general. Career civil servants. Beat reporters at papers that just cut their newsroom in half. Poll workers who took a Saturday training course. State legislators nobody can name.

People. Doing tedious jobs. Occasionally at real cost. Every single time, by choice.

That’s the maintenance crew. That’s all of it. That’s the whole thing.

History does not owe liberal democracy a happy ending. It has not signed anything.

One More Thing About The Mule

The Mule could Convert anybody. Generals, ministers, entire planetary governments. Absolute loyalty on demand, delivered on contact.

There’s exactly one person he never touches.

A woman named Bayta, who was kind to him back when he was going around disguised as a pathetic little court jester and she had no idea who he was. He leaves her alone on purpose. He wants one person — one, in a galaxy of quadrillions — who likes him for real rather than because he made them.

The most powerful individual in the known universe. Can manufacture devotion at industrial scale. Cannot manufacture the only version of it that counts.

And that’s what gets him, in the end. Not an army. Not the math. He spares the one person whose regard he actually wants, and she is the one who stops him.

Asimov named him the Mule for a reason. A mule is sterile. He builds an empire out of borrowed loyalty and leaves nothing behind that can outlive him.

The Dude will let you sit with that one. Take your time.

So Is Trump The Mule?

Not exactly.

He didn’t come from outside history and he doesn’t have mutant powers, and anybody selling you either of those is selling you comfort.

What he did was discover that the forces already loose in the country were far stronger than the people operating the machinery understood. That a lot of political laws were only customs. That shame was the enforcement mechanism, and that it stops working on a man who doesn’t feel it. And that a whole nation of otherwise capable people had quietly outsourced their agency to a Plan they’d never actually read.

Hari Seldon’s problem was never that history stopped having causes.

His problem was that one asshole showed up who wasn’t in the model, and everyone else had spent three centuries assuming they’d never have to do anything.

The Rug, Man

Look.

The Plan was the rug.

Not because it was valuable. Because it tied the room together. It made a pile of unrelated furniture — a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a guy — feel like a place where somebody lived. The Foundation’s real inheritance from Seldon was never the equations. It was permission to stop worrying.

And then somebody walked in and pissed on it.

You’ll notice the movie is not about getting the rug cleaned. It’s about the fact that there is no recourse, that the guy with the money isn’t going to make you whole, and that everybody who offers to help has their own thing going on.

The Dude abides.

The rug does not. The rug has to be replaced by somebody, out of pocket, on a Tuesday, with no reimbursement and no applause.

That’s the job, man.

Sorry.

(oh, and for the record, the Foundation show on Apple TV+ sucks. Read the book(s))

So Walter’s got the finger up again.

“You don’t own it, Dude. I want you to really sit with that. You’ve got an ACCOUNT. Somebody else’s machine, somebody else’s rules, and a guy you have never met can revoke your access on a Tuesday for reasons he is not obligated to explain to you. There’s a quota. There’s a LOG. Every single thing you do on there, somebody could pull up and read—”

Walter.

“—and you PAY for this. Monthly. Like rent. For the privilege of using a computer you will never see, in a building you will never enter, in a city you have never been to—”

Walter, man.

“What.”

You’re describing the computer lab.

“...I’m sorry?”

Nineteen eighty-six, man. You just described the computer lab.

So a while back I wrote about wanting to buy a CRT at two in the morning, and I landed on this whole tidy business about sorting your nostalgia into two piles — the stuff that’s a memory trick, and the stuff somebody actually took from you. Felt pretty good about it, honestly. Had a beverage. Considered the matter closed.

Then I thought about the lab, and the whole thing fell apart on me.

You Had an Account, Man

Here’s what a college computer lab was in the mid-eighties, and I want to be clear this was not exotic, this was almost every state school in the country.

There were no computers in the computer lab.

There were terminals. Glass and a keyboard and a cable, and the serial cable went into the wall, and somewhere on the other side of that wall was a PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E, and that machine was not in the room. Might not have been in the building. At our shop it wasn’t even in the same city— there was one of them at a campus a few hundred miles down the coast, reachable over an X.25 link that was about as reliable as a candle in a hurricane.

You had an account. You had a quota. You scheduled your time, because there were maybe thirty terminals and rather more than thirty students, and at the end of the semester you took whatever slot you could get, which is how you ended up in a fluorescent room at three in the morning with people you’d never met, and a cup of vending-machine coffee, all of you hunched over glass, waiting.

Waiting, mostly. Because the other thing about that room is that you could feel everybody else in it.

That’s not a figure of speech. When the lab filled up, the machine got slow, and you felt it in your hands. You’d hit return and there’d be this pause, and the pause was thirty other people’s work getting divided by one processor, and you learned to read the room by how long the pause was. Shared infrastructure you could sense. A queue you could feel in your fingertips.

And when the X.25 link went sideways it didn’t garble anything, which would’ve at least been honest. It just stopped. You’d keep typing into a black rectangle for a minute and a half, and then either everything you’d written would arrive all at once like a burp, or the session was already dead and had been dead the whole time and nobody had thought to mention it.

Account. Quota. Logs. Scheduled access. An administrator who could turn you off. A machine you would never lay eyes on, in a city you’d never been to, reached over a connection that failed by pretending it hadn’t.

Every single grievance in the modern complaint, man. All of it. Nineteen eighty-six.

And Then, Briefly, an Accident

So what happened?

What happened is that the chips got cheap faster than anybody worked out how to keep charging you rent.

That’s the whole story. It’s not a triumph of the human spirit. Nobody set out to liberate anybody. It’s a gap — a stretch of maybe twenty-five years where you could put a machine on a desk and the machine was yours, outright, no account, nobody to ask, nothing phoning home, mostly because there was no home to phone and nobody had built one yet.

You bought it and then you owned it. You could open it. You could sell it. You could throw it in a lake and the only consequence was a wet lake.

And everybody who came up inside that window — which is me, and possibly you, and definitely Walter — filed the whole arrangement under how computers are.

It was not how computers are. It was how computers were, for about twenty-five years, for reasons nobody planned and nobody defended, because it never occurred to us that it was the kind of thing that needed defending.

Subscribe now

Maude Has a Word for This

“You’ve made a category error about your baseline.”

She doesn’t even look up.

“You believe you’re defending a norm. You’re defending an outlier. Timesharing precedes the desktop and timesharing succeeds it — the intervening period is the deviation, not the trend. Your PDP-11 is the direct ancestor of every machine you now own. Unix was built on that hardware. C was designed against that instruction set. The lineage runs from the shared machine to the rented one with a brief accident in the middle.”

Yeah, okay, but—

“And your accident wasn’t distributed evenly, which you keep declining to mention. The machine only taught you anything if you had one. That required money, unstructured time, and a household in which a child taking apart an expensive object was tolerated rather than punished. Most of the people in that lab at three in the morning had none of those things. You are nostalgic for an inequality you happened to land on the correct side of.”

...Yeah. Yeah, that one’s fair.

Three Piles Now

So I gotta amend the thing I said last time, because two piles wasn’t enough. It’s three.

Pile one: stuff that genuinely got worse. You can’t open the case. You can’t fix it. You don’t own it after you buy it. Four companies decide what a computer is allowed to be. That’s real, it’s got names, and it’s got lawyers.

Pile two: stuff that only looks better because nobody had gotten around to exploiting it yet.And the flagship item here, man, the absolute champion: your student ID number was your Social Security number. Printed on class rosters. Taped to hallway walls. On graded exams left in a cardboard box outside a professor’s office where anybody could flip through them.

That wasn’t safe. That was a loaded gun on a coffee table in a house where nobody had yet thought to pick it up. Identity theft as a going concern needed credit reporting to go online first. We weren’t careful. We were early.

Every era’s got a pile two, and if you can’t name yours you’re not actually remembering, you’re just decorating.

Pile three: stuff somebody took on purpose. Which is where it gets interesting, because I used to think pile three meant they took something we had.

They didn’t. They closed a gap. There’s a difference and the difference is the whole ballgame.

Walter Is, Unfortunately, Right

“So we take it back.”

That’s the thing, Walter. There’s no back. Back is the lab. Back is a quota and a scheduling clipboard and a link to San Diego that dies in the middle of your sentence. You’d be marching toward the exact thing you’re mad about.

“Then we don’t take it back.”

No.

“We build it. Because the anomaly was REAL, Dude. It happened. Twenty-five years, in this country, a person could buy a machine and own the goddamn machine. That’s not a fantasy, that’s a documented historical period, and the only thing that made it happen was an accident of manufacturing costs — which means it can be made to happen ON PURPOSE. Right to repair. Interoperability. You bought it, you own it, forever, including the part where you open it up and look inside. None of that is nostalgia. That’s all NEW CONSTRUCTION.”

And here’s the thing that’s been sitting funny with me for about a week: he’s right.

Walter’s whole deal — the entire engine of the man — is that he cannot accept that a war is over. And usually that’s the problem. Usually that’s exactly the problem. But point that same refusal at the right target and it stops being a pathology and starts being the only useful instinct in the room.

He’s not asking to go back. He’s the only one of us who understood there was nowhere to go back to.

Donny

“So the good part was the mistake?”

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

Yeah.

Abide

Small confession to close this out.

Around 2002 I looked into buying one. A real PDP-11. Turns out the machines were cheap by then, almost embarrassingly so — people were giving them away out of basements, this thing that a university once mortgaged a building for.

What killed it was the disk pack. Couldn’t find media that would talk to it, couldn’t find a drive, and the whole plan died right there in a parking lot conversation.

So that’s twice now. Twice I’ve tried to purchase a decade, and both times the decade was in stock and the accessories were the problem. There’s a lesson in there and I’ve decided not to look at it directly.

Twenty-five years isn’t nothing, though. It’s most of a working life. It happened by accident, and it was never fairly handed out, and it is not the natural condition of anything — and none of that makes it less worth having. Some accidents are good enough that you should go back and cause them deliberately.

Which is a stranger position than it sounds, incidentally. You’d think wanting the old arrangement makes you a conservative. It doesn’t. There’s nothing to conserve. You’d be building something that has essentially never existed on purpose — a thing that showed up once, briefly, by mistake, and that somebody would now have to decide to make real.

That’s not looking backward. That’s about the most forward-looking thing there is. It just happens to be wearing a bathrobe and holding a grudge about a disk pack.

Anyway. I’ve got a rug now. Not the rug — a rug. Ties the room together about sixty percent, which honestly is fine, and I’m going bowling.

The Dude abides.

So it’s two in the morning and I’m lying there with a laptop on my chest, which is not a great look for a man of my particular vintage, and I’ve got about seventeen browser tabs open and every single one of them is a thirteen-inch Sony Trinitron.

Six hundred bucks. Plus shipping, which on a CRT runs roughly the GDP of a small island nation, because the thing weighs about what a bowling bag weighs if the bowling bag were full of other bowling bags. Guy in Sacramento. Listing says works, some burn-in, smells fine.

Smells fine. That’s the pitch, man. That’s what six hundred American dollars gets you in the year of our lord whatever this is — a forty-year-old television that a total stranger has personally certified as odor-neutral.

And the thing is, I own a monitor. It’s right there on the desk. It’s thin and enormous and so sharp it’s honestly a little rude about it. It does not smell at all. It has never once required me to adjust a dial labeled V-HOLD while the picture rolled like a slot machine.

So I’m not shopping for a monitor.

I’m shopping for a Tuesday afternoon in 1982.

And look — I’ve been here before. I know this feeling in my bones. This is the rug thing. This is exactly the rug thing. Because I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life trying to replace a rug, and I have acquired several rugs in the process, and not one of them tied the room together, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that what tied the room together was never the goddamn rug.

Here’s 48K. Knock Yourself Out.

You gotta understand what the machine was actually offering.

You flipped the switch and there was BASIC. Not a login. Not a spinning thing. Not a cheerful little popup asking if you’d like to personalize your experience. Just a cursor, blinking at you with what I can only describe as an attitude.

And you typed:

10 PRINT "BUTTS"
20 GOTO 10

And the computer did it. Forever. Filled the whole screen with your one stupid word until you made it stop.

That was the whole deal, man. Two lines between curiosity and consequence. You could poke a memory address and turn the screen purple and not fully understand why, and that not fully understanding why was the good part, because it meant there was somewhere to go.

The other thing nobody tells you about that era is how porous everything was. You’d play Star Raiders for four hours, and then you’d start wondering how the stars moved, and then you’d type in a program out of a magazine — a whole program, by hand, off a page, like a monk — and then you’d change a number in it just to see what broke. And then some kid at school would hand you a floppy with nine games and a text editor and a strange little utility somebody’s older brother wrote with no documentation whatsoever.

The line between playing with the thing and taking the thing apart barely existed. You were a consumer for about ten minutes and then you were something else.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s just what the machine was.

Subscribe now

Walter Would Like to Discuss the Licensing Agreement

“You didn’t buy it, Dude.”

Walter’s got his finger up. This is a finger-up situation.

“You think you bought it. You licensed it. There’s a difference and the difference is the whole ballgame. You bought a cartridge in 1982 — that cartridge was YOURS. You could throw it in a lake. You could sell it to a guy in a parking lot. You could pry the case open with a screwdriver and look at the guts, and the guts were also YOURS.”

Walter, man—

“I’m not finished. Now you ‘buy’ something and it’s a revocable license to access a service, and the service can be discontinued at the sole discretion of a company that will be acquired twice before Christmas. That’s not ownership. That’s a hall pass. Am I wrong?”

You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just—

“And the tractors! You want to talk about the tractors? A man buys a two-hundred-thousand-dollar tractor and cannot legally fix his own tractor. This is farmland, Dude. This is not ‘Nam. There are rules, and the rules got quietly rewritten while everybody was looking at their phones.”

Here’s the annoying part: he’s right. That’s not a rug problem. That’s not a feelings problem. Right-to-repair, interoperability, who’s allowed to open the case — those are real fights with real lawyers, and they’re happening right now, and they’d be worth fighting even if none of us had ever touched an Atari.

Share

Maude Has the Numbers, and They Are Unhelpful

Maude turns from the easel with that expression she gets.

“It’s called rosy retrospection. It’s well documented. You retain the emotional peaks of an experience and the routine friction decays. Related mechanisms: peak-end evaluation, fading affect bias. The unpleasantness is not repressed. It simply doesn’t survive storage.”

Yeah, okay, but—

“You remember the disk drive’s clunk. You do not remember the forty minutes it spent failing to read sector 347. You remember the graphics. You do not remember the RF interference, or the cassette loader, or the fact that a task requiring fifteen seconds today required an afternoon.”

“And the surrounding decade, since we’re doing this: leaded gasoline still in the tank. Smog you could chew. No Americans with Disabilities Act until 1990. Considerably worse odds on most cancers. If you’d like a decade with better outcomes on nearly every measurable axis, you are currently standing in it.”

She’s not wrong either. Nobody in my life is ever wrong, it’s exhausting.

Yeah, Well, That’s Just, Like, Your Data, Man

Except here’s where I get off the bus.

Because rosy retrospection explains a lot of it and it doesn’t explain all of it, and the part it doesn’t explain is the part that actually matters.

Some of it was true.

The machine was legible. You could hold a meaningful fraction of it in your head, and the parts you couldn’t hold were reachable if you got curious enough. Now you click an icon and it talks to fifteen services you’ll never see about things it will never tell you.

You owned it. No account. No terms. No thing that phones home. Nobody was watching you use it, because there was nobody on the other end and no other end to be on.

And it was finite. There was a bottom to it. You could conceivably get to the bottom.

Those aren’t distortions, man. Those are losses, and they’ve got names, and some of them have got policy attached. So when a guy tells you the past was better and you feel that little click of recognition — the click is real. Something did get taken. The click is not the problem.

The problem is who’s standing there when you feel it.

The Big Lebowski Would Like to Sell You 1982

Somebody figured out a while back that the ache is the product.

Not the thing. The ache. Because the thing is a dying television with burn-in and the ache is priceless, and once you understand that a legitimate grievance about ownership can be repackaged as an aesthetic, you can charge whatever you want and people will thank you for it. Six hundred for the Trinitron. Ninety bucks for a plastic console with thirty games in it. There’s a whole industry now selling people the feeling of a machine they can’t get back, which — fine, honestly. It’s a hustle but it’s a small hustle. Nobody’s getting hurt over a mini NES.

The bigger version of the hustle doesn’t sell you hardware.

You know the pitch. Everything was better, everything was ours, everything worked, and then they took it, and if you’ll just come this way I’ll get it all back for you. And Brandt walks you down the hall showing you the plaques and the photographs and the key to the city from a city that maybe never gave him one, and the whole time you’re admiring the achievements of a man who has personally achieved approximately nothing, whose money came from somewhere else entirely, who is going to look you dead in the eye and inform you that your revolution is over and the bums lost.

He didn’t lose anything. He never had it. That’s what makes him so good at this — a guy who genuinely remembers the thing can’t sell it to you clean, because he’d get distracted telling you about it. A fraud never gets distracted. The past is just inventory.

And the tell is always the same: he’ll talk about the feeling all day long and he will never, not once, take a position on who’s allowed to open the case.

Donny Says a Thing

Donny looks up from his shoes.

“Are you trying to get the computer back, or the kid back?”

“Donny, you’re out of your element.”

Yeah. Sure. Okay.

The Two Piles

So what I’ve settled on, more or less, is that you gotta sort the ache into two piles.

Pile one is stuff you can actually do something about. Whether you own the thing you bought. Whether you can fix it. Whether it talks about you behind your back. Whether four companies get to decide what a computer is. That’s all legislation, man. It’s boring and it’s slow and it involves committees, but it’s real, and anybody who’s genuinely mad about what happened to computers should be able to say a sentence about it that doesn’t involve the word “vibes.”

Pile two is that you were twelve, and the world was brand new, and nobody knew what the thing on the desk was going to become — including the people who built it. That’s not coming back. Not for six hundred bucks, not for six million, not for a candidate. That pile is closed. You can visit but you can’t move in.

I closed the tabs, incidentally. Left the Trinitron to some other sucker in Sacramento. Poured myself a beverage, put on some Creedence, and sat in a room that a rug has not tied together in a very long time.

Room’s still fine, man. Room’s still a room.

The Dude abides.

Do you have a tale from your discovery of technology and computers? Share it below! The Dude wants to know man.

So look. You know the rug story. Two guys come into my house, one of them holds me down, the other one unzips and ruins a perfectly good Persian, and the whole thing is a case of mistaken identity because some other Lebowski owes some other people some other money. Fine. That’s Tuesday.

But imagine there’d been a third guy in the room. Not one of the heavies. A guy in a good suit, standing by the door, hands folded, watching the whole thing happen. Doesn’t hold me down. Doesn’t unzip. Just observes. And then, weeks later, this guy calls up a reporter and says — on background, strictly not for attribution — that he was really troubled by what happened to that rug. That the rug had, in his private estimation, tied the room together. That he had grave concerns about the direction of the whole pissing-on-rugs enterprise.

And then he holds the door for the next two guys with the bucket.

That’s Washington, man. That’s the entire genre.

Right now, as you read this, some Republican senator is telling a reporter that he’s deeply worried. He thinks the president has crossed a line. He fears for the Constitution, the rule of law, the credibility of the party, the republic itself, the whole enchilada. He is anguished. He is losing sleep. He wanted someone to know.

Tomorrow he votes for it.

You’ve read this story a few hundred times since 2016. The details rotate — a scandal, an impeachment, some ghoul of a nominee, an act of self-dealing so brazen it gets posted about in advance — but the shape of it never changes:

Republican senators are privately alarmed. Senior officials describe the president as increasingly erratic. Members of his own party worry he has gone too far. None of them would speak on the record. The vote passes 52–48.

He is disturbed. She is appalled. Pearls are clutched. They are absolutely beside themselves behind closed doors. And then they come out of the closed doors, straighten the jacket, and vote exactly the way the man told them to.

Off the record is where Republican courage goes to die with its reputation intact.

First, the carve-out, because I’m not a barbarian

This is not a brief against anonymous sourcing. I want to be extremely clear about that before Walter shows up and starts explaining the First Amendment to people who did not ask.

Anonymous sources are sometimes the whole ballgame. They expose crimes. They surface things the public would otherwise never know — the retaliation, the buried memo, the order that got carried out quietly at four in the morning. Somebody who risks a career, a prosecution, or a knock on the door to drag hidden misconduct into daylight is doing a public service. Full stop. No notes. That person is a hero and I would buy them a beverage.

That is not what’s happening in the Republican-anxiety genre.

In these stories the conduct isn’t hidden. It’s not buried. Nobody had to sneak it out in a briefcase. The public already heard what the guy said, usually because he said it into a microphone, and then posted about it, and then posted about it again with a picture. The vote’s on the calendar. The nominee’s name is public. The abuse is happening in the middle of the street at noon with a confession stapled to it.

The anonymous Republican is not revealing the misconduct.

He’s revealing that he noticed the misconduct.

Which — fine. Psychologically that’s kind of fascinating. Politically it’s worth roughly a bag of ice. Anonymity protects a person who is telling you something you don’t know. It is not courage when the secret being protected is this man possesses functioning eyes.

Share

Strong men also cry, Mr. Lebowski

So ask the practical question, the one that never seems to get asked: what actually changes because a senator privately admits the president is dangerous?

Well. It reassures the reporter. The reporter walks out of that lunch with proof that responsible Republicans still exist somewhere in the building, which lets the story keep the comfortable two-faction shape — the maniacs over here, the sober grown-ups over there, quietly straining at the leash. Comforting stuff. Implies the machine still has brakes.

Brakes that exist only as anonymous quotations are not brakes, man. They’re a bedtime story with a dateline.

It reassures the reader, too. The respectable conservative gets to believe the old party is still down there under the floorboards, working levers nobody can see, biding its time, waiting for the moment. This belief has now survived about nine consecutive years of observable evidence to the contrary, which is honestly an impressive run for a coping mechanism wearing a press pass.

But mostly it reassures the guy himself. And here is where I have to talk about the other Lebowski.

You remember him. Pasadena. The wheelchair, the wall of achievements, the framed photograph with Nancy Reagan, the whole museum of a life. Strong men also cry, Mr. Lebowski. Strong men also cry. The man wept at me about his burdens. He lectured me — me, in his study, with the fireplace going — about achievement and bums and what a man owes. And it turned out every dollar of it was Maude’s, every achievement was invented, and the only thing he’d ever actually built was the story he told himself on the way to the bathroom mirror.

That’s the anonymous senator. That’s the whole species.

He isn’t just protecting his career when he calls that reporter. He’s protecting the autobiography. In the autobiography he was never an accomplice, he was an adult in the room. He worked quietly. He prevented worse things. He stayed because somebody responsible had to stay. The fact that the worse things kept happening anyway gets filed as an unfortunate production detail, like weather.

You want the purest specimen? September 2018, New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” An anonymous senior official assuring the country that the grown-ups were quietly thwarting the president’s worst impulses from inside the house he was actively burning down. Two years later it turns out to be Miles Taylor, chief of staff at DHS, who converted the bit into a book deal and a cable contract.¹

The resistance had a book deal. Brandt handled the paperwork.

And this is where the single most load-bearing fiction in Republican Washington gets deployed, the one that holds up the whole ceiling: the president is receiving bad advice. When the guy does something indefensible, these people never — not once, not ever — say he wanted this, because it serves him, because that’s who he is. They say somebody’s whispering to him. Somebody got to him. There are bad people around him.

I’m not paraphrasing. Thom Tillis — the most liberated Republican in the Senate, a man with statistically nothing left to lose — said out loud on CNN this spring: “I don’t criticize him, because I expect these people to protect him.”

Read that again while I roll something. The senator’s theory of his own job is to holler at the staff, so that the staff will do a better job protecting the man, who needs protecting, from the staff.

Blaming the advisers launders the president’s innocence and the senator’s autobiography in the same load. Two-for-one, cold water, delicates cycle.

Subscribe now

Walter would like a word about the rules

Now I have to hand this next part to Walter, because it’s a rules thing, and Walter is at his absolute best on rules and at his absolute worst on literally everything else.

The Never Trump crowd — who I read, and mostly like, even while I’m sitting here dunking on them — has this favorite observation. They know what he is. The senators know he lies. The aides know he’s impulsive. The former officials know he’s dangerous. The party leadership knew the election claims were horseshit and said so privately in real time.

This always gets presented as grounds for hope.

It’s an aggravating factor. It’s the opposite of a defense. It’s the prosecution’s exhibit.

If these people genuinely didn’t understand what was happening, they could plead ignorance. Confusion. Bad information. Being lied to. The anonymous quotes take that defense off the table, walk it out back, and set it on fire. They establish that the man recognized the danger and chose accommodation anyway, in full possession of the facts, with time to think it over.

Somewhere along the way “he knows better” turned into an exoneration, which is one of the stranger developments in American public life. A senator who understands the corruption and votes for it anyway is not morally superior to the one who swallowed the propaganda whole. He may be intellectually superior. Congratulations to him. Knowledge counts for something only when it touches conduct, and knowing the truth in private does not count for a damn thing when your public power is being spent on behalf of the lie.

Which brings me to Walter’s actual contribution, and I want to be fair to the man, he’s right about this one.

Smokey went over the line. Eight frame. Smokey’s toe was over, plain as day, and Smokey wanted to mark it an eight, and Walter — in a manner I am not endorsing, involving a firearm in a family bowling establishment — pointed out that this is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

Here’s the thing about the rules. Nobody cares how Smokey felt about the line. Nobody cares that Smokey privately understood where the line was, respected the line as a concept, had grave reservations about crossing the line. The foot was over. Mark it zero.

You don’t get credit for the shot you took in your head, man. The sheet doesn’t have a column for that.

Ve believe in nothing, Lebowski

Which brings us to the current cast, helpfully assembled for us by the political press: the YOLO Republicans.² Tillis, retiring. Bill Cassidy, who got beaten in his Louisiana primary in May. John Cornyn, who lost to Ken Paxton and became the first sitting Texas senator to lose a primary since 1970. I took my shots at these guys in the Buckley piece and nothing since has moved me an inch.

The theory was clean and appealing. These men were afraid of primaries. Take the primary away — retire them, beat them, cut the cord — and they’d finally say the true thing out loud. Nothing left to lose.

Nothing left to lose. Ve believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing!

And then the nihilists turn out to be scared of a dog. A large one, granted. A Lhasa Apso with papers. But a dog.

The theory got it wrong about what these guys actually value. A man can lose his seat and still care enormously about a great many things: staying welcome in Republican society, the donor relationships, the board seat in eighteen months, the conservative media hits, the colleagues, the safety of his family, a legacy that doesn’t get him written up as a traitor to the tribe. And most of all — this is the big one — he can still be completely unwilling to admit what his own last ten years mean.

So Tillis gets “unleashed,” which the press adores as a framing. He demands Kristi Noem’s resignation. He sneers at “30 and 40 somethings like Stephen Miller.” He announces he’s “sick of stupid.” And in the same stretch where federal agents’ conduct in Minneapolis is supposedly the thing that has him furious, he texts the president “Great job” for sending Tom Homan into Minnesota.

Then he says it right out loud, on the record, to anybody listening: “You will see over the next 339 days that I support the vast majority of what the president wants.”

He can criticize the plan. He can criticize the advisers. He can demand better paperwork, a cleaner process, a more professional class of goon.

He cannot say: the president is corrupt and he’s doing this on purpose.

The YOLO caucus turned out to have no elections left to lose and a truly astonishing number of fucks remaining to give.

Now — and I try to be fair here, it costs me, but I try — Tillis has done one genuinely real thing. We’ll get there. It’s the exception, and it proves the entire rule, and it’s more instructive than anything else in this piece.

Maude explains the mechanics

Maude would tell you this part without any of the throat-clearing, so let’s do it her way. Flat, clinical, no jokes. She’s usually right about everything, which is annoying, and she knows it, which is worse.

Political courage is not a personal virtue. It is infrastructure.

One person’s visible refusal lowers the cost of the next person’s refusal. That’s the whole mechanism. When a senator says the thing under his own name, the next senator has cover. Donors who’d back a break can find someone to back. Voters who thought they were alone discover they aren’t. Reporters get to describe a real faction instead of an imaginary one. The price of dissent gets divided among more people, which is the only way the price ever comes down.

Anonymous dissent does exactly none of this. Worse — it does the opposite. It traps every potential dissenter inside the belief that he’s the only one. The senator tells the reporter, on deep background, that many of my colleagues feel the same way. But the public sees no disagreement. The president sees no disagreement. The base sees no disagreement. And the next wavering senator, the one who might’ve gone if somebody went first, sees no disagreement.

Ten private consciences produce the exact same public result as zero consciences.

And that’s not an attack on the reporters, by the way. Those conversations produce real insight into how the machine runs. But the framing needs calling out, because too often the private anguish gets presented as evidence of Republican resistance when it is evidence of the absence of Republican resistance. The story says Republicans privately recoil. The observable reality says Republicans are voting yes. The private reaction is context. The public act is the story. The anonymous quotation should never be allowed to outweigh the recorded vote.

If the hand-wringing has to run — and it will, every time, forever — then run it with the load-bearing word attached: Republicans who say privately that this is dangerous are nevertheless expected to support it.

That “nevertheless” is the whole piece. Everything else is set decoration.

What the real thing looks like

Here’s what I’m not asking for. I’m not asking for martyrdom. Nobody needs a floor speech with a string section and a slow dolly-in. Real opposition is boring and it’s mostly procedural: vote no. Withhold consent. Use the committee. Refuse to confirm the unfit guy. Sign the letter with your actual name on it. Join the lawsuit. Stand next to a Democrat in daylight. Back a primary challenger. Resign instead of carrying out the unlawful order.

The standard isn’t heroism. It’s public conduct with consequences attached.

And now the exception, which I promised, and which I want to give full credit for, because it demonstrates exactly how mundane and how effective the real thing is.

Tillis — same guy, the one who won’t criticize the president directly — sat on the Banking Committee while the Justice Department ran a criminal probe of Fed chair Jerome Powell over cost overruns on a building renovation. Which is, and I say this as a man with no financial training whatsoever, a clown-show pretext. Tillis called it a vindictive prosecution. Out loud. Under his own name. And he announced he would not vote for any Fed chair nominee — including Kevin Warsh, whom he liked, whom he praised — until that probe was done.

Banking is 13–11. One Republican defection deadlocks it. Warsh sat there for months. Powell’s term was running out in May and there was no chair-in-waiting who could get out of committee.

One senator. One hold. One pressure point. And it worked — the probe ended.

Sort of. Here’s the part I have to tell you, because I’m not going to pull the same trick on you they pull on the reporters. The U.S. Attorney’s office didn’t drop the thing so much as hand it to the Fed’s inspector general, with the understanding that it could come back if the IG made a criminal referral. Tillis got his assurances over a weekend, went on Meet the Press Sunday to say he had confidence it was over, and cast the deciding vote to move Warsh out of committee.

So they didn’t drop it, man. They put it in a different drawer. And the senator looked in the drawer, decided he liked what he saw, and moved the president’s guy along.

But I want to be honest about the shape of it: that was still power, exercised in public, against a danger the man had named. It was not a vibe. It was not an emotion shared with a journalist over a nice pinot. It’s the only thing in this entire essay that made a government agency change its behavior, and it was done by a guy who cannot bring himself to say the president is doing any of this on purpose.

Which is the tell. He’ll name the prosecution. He won’t name the prosecutor’s boss.

Because language counts too, when it’s accurate. “The president is getting bad advice” is evasion. “The president is using the Justice Department for personal revenge” is information. The first one is a lullaby. The second one costs the speaker something, and the cost is precisely how you know it’s real.

The ledger

For nearly a decade now, respectable Republicans have asked to be judged on their private intentions rather than their public effects. They were concerned. They worked behind the scenes. They prevented worse things, allegedly, none of which can be verified, all of which are described exclusively by the person seeking credit. They disapproved of the tone.

But these were not guys watching from the cheap seats with a beer and a limited view. These were senators. Cabinet officials. Prosecutors, lawyers, party chairs, the people who write the checks. They had authority — real, sovereign, roll-call authority — and their votes and confirmations and endorsements and silences had consequences, and the consequences are the ledger. That’s it. That’s the whole accounting.

The moral unit in politics is not the private thought. It’s the public use of power. History is not going to footnote every wrecking-ball vote with the senator’s anonymous assurance that he felt just terrible about it at the time.

Their private discomfort proves they weren’t fooled.

It does not prove they resisted.

Put your name on it

There’ll be another one before the weekend. Another scandal, another call, another Republican official explaining that colleagues are alarmed, that a line has been crossed, that it’s worse in there than the public understands.

And the response should be one question, asked every single time, with no follow-up until it’s answered: what are you going to do about it, and may I use your name?

Because there will be an anonymous Republican tomorrow. He’ll be deeply troubled. He’ll understand the stakes better than you do. He’ll assure the reporter that many of his colleagues feel exactly the same way.

Then he’ll vote with the president.

At this point the anonymous confession shouldn’t reassure anybody. It should be entered into evidence.

He knew. He understood. He helped anyway.

Off the record is not opposition. Private courage is not a political act. And a conscience that never once interferes with the exercise of power is just a story a coward tells himself at night, in a nice house, with the lights off.

The rug’s gone, man. It’s been gone a while. And the guy by the door is still telling reporters how much he admired it.

¹ Taylor’s follow-up book was called A Warning, and it moved units, because warnings always sell best when they’re anonymous and free. He’s a CNN contributor now, which is where the adults in the room go after the room burns down.

² NPR, The Dispatch, and Politico have all run the “YOLO” framing on Tillis, Cassidy, and Cornyn. Cornyn rejects the label, which is the single most John Cornyn thing that has ever happened.

³ Credit where it’s due and I mean it: this is the same Tillis who, when a reporter suggested he only talks straight now that he’s not running again, answered “It’s like no shit, Sherlock.” The man is not incapable of candor. He’s rationing it.

So there’s this guy on the television, day after some Democrat loses a special election nobody outside three counties has ever heard of, and he does that thing they do — gets all solemn, like he’s delivering a eulogy for a guy he never much liked in the first place. Says the party “strayed too far from the center.”

Nobody asks where the center is. Nobody asks which issue. Nobody asks whether these mythical center-voters switched sides, or stayed home to watch the Lakers, or just didn’t care for the candidate’s tie. The center gets invoked like some kind of secular saint you pray to when you don’t feel like examining why your guy ran a bad campaign. It’s the political equivalent of blaming a wrecked Torino on insufficient respect for the moon.

I made myself a White Russian over this one. Then another, because it’s a two-drink question, man: how many voters actually live in this center, and what in the hell do they believe?

I. The Rug That Doesn’t Exist

Depending on who’s counting, “the center” is either everybody who calls themselves independent, or just the ones who don’t lean either way, or the mixed-belief types, or the genuinely undecided, or the people who hate both candidates but’ll vote anyway, or the ones who might just stay home. That’s six different rugs, man, and the pundits keep pointing at whichever one happens to be on sale that week.

Maude: The category is not a person, Jeffrey. It is a container. You are describing several incompatible containers and calling them one rug.

She’s not wrong. She’s usually not wrong, which is its own kind of aggravating. Maude doesn’t do vibes — she looks at a room full of “moderates” the way she looks at everything else, clinically, like she’s cataloguing specimens for a very expensive gallery show. And what she’ll tell you is that the “center” that wins you an argument on cable news is never the same “center” that wins you an election. Commentary grabs the big, generous definition when it wants a mandate, then swaps in the small, actually-persuadable definition when it’s time to write a strategy memo. Same word. Different rug. Nobody tells you they switched it out from under the coffee table.

Subscribe now

II. The Airline You Hate But Keep Flying

A lot of “independents” aren’t floating around in some ideological Switzerland. They’re partisans who are pissed off at their own side and don’t want the loyalty card. “I don’t like these people, but the other people are worse” — that’s not centrism, man, that’s negative partisanship with the label torn off.

It’s like hating an airline — the legroom, the change fees, the guy reclining into your knees in 14C — and flying it every single time anyway because the other airline’s worse and you already have status. You didn’t become neutral about air travel. You just stopped wearing the sweatshirt.

Walter: You think these “independents” are neutral? Nobody’s neutral, Dude. I didn’t agree with every clause when I converted, but I didn’t go around calling myself a moderate Jew. You’re either in the covenant or you’re not. Three thousand years of tradition doesn’t come with a comment card. You can’t offer notes.

Say what you want about Walter — and I generally do — but the man does not do things by half measures, and he’s accidentally onto something. A lot of these “independents” are exactly like Walter: fully committed to a side, furious about specific line items, still showing up every single time. Different receipt, same pew.

Share

III. Six Opinions Don’t Average Into a Seventh

Donny: So if I’m for healthcare and I’m for guns, that makes me a moderate?

Walter: NO, DONNY. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Donny’s actually circling something here, which is rare, and Walter shutting him down is, as always, extremely on brand. Because no — six real opinions don’t average into a seventh, moderate opinion. A spreadsheet can average a guy’s positions into a tidy little dot on a chart. His ballot cannot. He doesn’t get to send an averaged government home with him. He picks a coalition, one of them, and the rest of his opinions go along for the ride whether they like it or not.

Which is its own kind of selective devotion, and Walter, ironically, is the league’s foremost expert. Man carries a piece to bowling night over a foot fault but doesn’t seem to sweat the actual legal system nearly as hard. Everybody picks which of their own rules get enforced. The question was never how many opinions a guy’s got scattered across the political map — it’s which ones he lets cost him a vote.

IV. There Is No Center Lane

Ask a pundit to “move to the center” and ask him center on what, exactly. Immigration? Abortion? Healthcare? Guns? Taxes? Foreign policy? The median voter on one issue isn’t the median voter on the next one over. Candidate moves right on the border and left on drug prices — is that toward the center or away from it? Nobody can tell you, because there’s no center lane at Hollywood Lanes, man. There’s a gutter on each side and some wood in the middle, and the wood doesn’t care about your feelings.

“Moderate” mostly describes a costume anyway. A guy can run genuinely hard-right policy, wear sensible shoes, talk softly about “process,” and the panel calls him a moderate. Another guy runs broadly popular economic positions but raises his voice doing it, and suddenly he’s the extremist. That’s not measuring a position. That’s judging a jumpsuit.

V. This Is Not ‘Nam, This Is Electability. There Are Rules.

Walter: TOO FAR LEFT ON WHAT, THOUGH? Too far left among WHOM? In WHICH district, compared to WHICH opponent? Did the voters switch sides or did they just stay home? DID THE POSITION ALSO MOTIVATE ANYBODY? You want to invoke a rule, Dude, you cite the rule. This is not Vietnam. This is electability. There are rules.

Which would carry more weight, honestly, if Walter had ever once cited an actual rule instead of just yelling that one exists. But that’s the whole racket, man — “too far left” gets treated as an objective diagnosis when ninety percent of the time it just means “this candidate drifted from the politics I personally find respectable,” laundered through a focus group and repackaged as neutral electability advice. Call it the Electability Vibes Department. No mailing address. Big budget.

VI. The League Doesn’t Need to Agree. It Just Needs to Show Up.

Here’s the better way to think about it, man. The center isn’t a bloc that shares a program. It’s Thursday night at the lanes — a room full of people who don’t agree on politics, religion, or the correct way to treat a rented shoe, and who show up anyway, keep score, and go home. Nobody there voted for a shared platform. They just all had their own reason to be in the building.

Same with an election. A candidate doesn’t lose because some unified center rejected him. He loses because enough different people had enough different reasons to say no — one hated the position on the border, one hated the tone, one thinks the guy’s a crook, one’s just tired, one didn’t care for the tie. Different scorecards. Same final number on the board.

So look. The center’s not a country with a capital and a passport office. It’s not a rug you go buy and have delivered. It gets assembled fresh, every single election, out of people who agree on almost nothing except that this time, one of the candidates gave them a reason to say no.

That’s not a coalition. That’s not an ideology. That’s a margin of error wearing business casual, and it changes its shoes every two years.

The operatives will keep hunting the cryptid anyway, because the cryptid’s useful — it justifies the candidates they already liked, it disciplines the ones they didn’t, it comforts the donors, and it means nobody has to sit down and look hard at why the campaign actually lost. Easier to blame the rug for not tying the room together than admit you never had a room to begin with.

Me, I’m going bowling. The lanes have actual rules. Somebody go explain that to Walter.

The Dude abides.

Okay, so, I’m at the lanes last Tuesday, minding my own business, nursing a White Russian, and Walter’s going off again about how the whole Never Trump thing reminds him of Charlie. Not the boy who could bowl, the other Charlie. The one in the jungle.

“They said he was hiding out there too, Dude. Deep in the tree line. Command kept sending more guys in to find him. More guys, more choppers, more fuckin’ guys. You know how many times we found the last guy in the woods?”

I did not know.

“Never, Dude. We never found the last guy. There is no last guy. This is not Vietnam, but it is exactly like Vietnam.”

Walter’s insane, obviously, he’s always been insane, but every once in a great while the man accidentally backs the ball into the pocket. And this is one of those times, man, because that’s the whole racket, isn’t it. Ten years now, this country’s been standing at the edge of the woods, rattling a bag of NATO commitments and tax credits like a dog treat, waiting for the last reasonable Republican to come mosey on out from behind a tree. They’re in there, man. Somewhere past the cul-de-sac. Wall Street Journal folded under one arm, still wondering what they did with Paul Ryan, waiting for a Democrat sufficiently housebroken to earn their vote. Every cycle, same pitch. Nominate someone calmer. Trim a faction. Get one more retired four-star general to frown into a camera. Do that, and they’ll finally walk out of the trees. I got bad news, man. That lane’s been bowled. Frame’s over. Score’s on the board.

Share

The Project Actually Worked, Man

Now look, I’m not here to shit on the Never Trump crowd entirely. That’d be un-abiding of me. They did real work. Real strategists, real money, real ads, real ex-Republicans standing in front of a camera telling other Republicans it was okay to bail without becoming, like, a card-carrying member of anything. That mattered. It moved actual votes in actual states. Helped put the man out to pasture in 2020, kept doing work since. That rug tied the room together for a minute there, man. I’ll give ‘em that.

But here’s the thing about a rug, and here’s the thing about a finite pool of persuadable voters: eventually it gets threadbare, and no amount of Febreze™ changes that. The voters who were gonna bail over January 6th already bailed. The ones spooked by the corruption have had a decade of corruption to sit with. The ones who left over “he’s just not who I thought he was” left. That’s it. That’s the whole box of Kleenex™, man, and it’s empty. So somebody’s gotta ask the impolite question, and since nobody else at this lane’s gonna do it — how many of these people do we honestly think are left in the woods?

The Orchard’s Been Picked Clean

I stopped by Maude’s loft to run this by her, figuring she’d have a colder read than a stoner in a soiled bathrobe with a bowling ball. She did not disappoint.

“The remaining Republican electorate is not confused, Jeffrey. Confusion implies a deficit of information they do not have. They have the information. Some admire the cruelty. Some believe the accusations are manufactured regardless of evidence. Some have simply decided their opponents forfeited the right to govern. This is not a persuasion problem. It is a preference.” Then she went back to whatever art thing she was doing with the harness, and I did not ask. Man, she’s a lot, but she’s rarely wrong. Point is, persuasion ain’t mining, dude. The vein doesn’t refill itself just ‘cause the consultants show up with a nicer drill. You can strip an orchard once. After that you’re just standing under bare branches insisting there’s one more apple in there somewhere.

Subscribe now

The Last of the Romneyicans

Donny leans in around frame six, all earnest. “What’s a Romneyican, Walter?”

“DONNY. It is a mythological creature, like a unicorn, except instead of a horn it’s got a subscription to the Journal and a mild, deniable prejudice about tax brackets. It lives in a tasteful kitchen renovation. Nobody has photographed one since 2012.”

“Huh,” said Donny, and went back to his nachos, having once again asked the only honest question in the building. That’s the guy, man. College-educated, suburban, fiscally tight, socially fine with whatever as long as it’s quiet about it, dislikes the vulgarity more than the policy. Some of those people exist! Some voted Democrat already. Some split tickets. Fine. Good. Welcome ‘em. But the political class treats this guy like Sasquatch with a Roth IRA — everybody’s real sure he’s out there, everybody’s built a whole hunting expedition around finding him, and meanwhile every other voter who might actually show up gets talked about like a liability. The nonvoter’s lazy. The young voter’s flaky. The union guy’s a lost cause. The rural voter’s a lost cause. But the Romneyican, he’s always one more Lincoln Project ad away from coming home. An endangered species doesn’t get to run the zoo, man.

Chasing the Ghost Costs You the Whole Team

Here’s what happens when you build a strategy around the last guy in the woods: you start recruiting a bowling team designed to offend nobody instead of winning games. Nobody talks about the guy who owns the lanes anymore. Nobody swings hard. Conflict with money gets recast as bad manners. The preferences of people who still won’t join the team get a permanent veto over the people who showed up and paid league dues for twenty years. A coalition can welcome converts. Sure. Abide by that. But it doesn’t have to hand the new guy the keys to the equipment room on his first night. And after ‘24, man, this isn’t theoretical. Harris ran with a stack of former Republican endorsements as long as my bar tab. Cheney, generals, the whole respectable-adult roadshow. Might’ve helped some. Might’ve kept the score closer. She still lost all seven battlegrounds. That’s not proof the coalition was too moderate — elections don’t hand you clean proofs like that — but it sure as hell isn’t proof that doing the same thing again, harder, with even more deference to the center-right guys who showed up late, is the move. You don’t get to lose every swing state and then declare your strategy permanently exempt from criticism. That’s not how any of this works, man.

Who Hasn’t Been Gotten, Man

Alright, dropping the bit for a second, because this part actually matters to me. Instead of pouring another decade into finding the last Republican in the woods, maybe try asking who’s standing in plain sight that nobody’s bothered to organize. Young people who’ve concluded the whole system’s rigged and don’t see much reason to argue. Working folks who don’t feel like either party’s fighting for their check. Rural voters who haven’t met a Democrat who showed up between elections. Union households drifting away because nobody’s knocked on the door. People who don’t love either party but respond to somebody willing to name who’s cashing in and who’s getting squeezed. You can’t get those people with a TV spot and a retired admiral. That crowd needs a local candidate they’ve actually met. It needs school board races and county commission races and someone showing up to the union hall in March instead of October of an election year. It’s slower. It’s less glamorous. Nobody’s booking that on Sunday morning television. But it’s where the future’s actually sitting, man, in plain sight, not behind some tree line.

Leave the Porch Light On

I’m not saying kick the Never Trump folks out of the party, man. They know the terrain. They can testify to what happened in there. Let ‘em stay, let ‘em talk, pour ‘em a drink even. Just stop reorganizing the whole outfit around the preferences of people still standing in the vestibule deciding whether to come in. Leave the porch light on for the stragglers. Fine. Give ‘em a folding chair. But quit sending the whole fuckin’ team out into the dark to beat the bushes for a guy who left the building years ago. There’s a bowling alley full of people right here, man, who’ve never once been asked to join the league. The last gettable Republican’s probably already been gotten. The Dude abides.

The Dude had just witnessed one of the longest and most impressive acting careers in Hollywood history.

Forty-eight years.

Same square head. Same heavy brow. Same general expression of a man who has seen some shit and does not intend to discuss it before the second drink arrives.

In 1977, Josh Brolin was a rugged desert lawman defending a small town from a giant satanic automobile in The Car. Then, almost half a century later, he appeared in Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, as Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, a brusque, domineering clergyman who inspired the sort of warm community feeling usually associated with contested wills and unattended arsenic.

The Dude sat back, took a sip of his White Russian, and thought:

Man, Josh Brolin has really taken care of himself.

Then Maude entered the conversation, metaphorically speaking, and explained with the clinical precision of someone correcting a child’s understanding of human reproduction:

“That was James Brolin.”

Josh Brolin’s father.

Different Brolin entirely.

Walter rejected this immediately.

“They have the same face, Dude. This is clearly a continuity issue.”

Donny looked up from the popcorn.

“Was James Brolin Thanos?”

“Donny, you’re out of your cinematic universe.”

In the Dude’s Defense, Man

Now, the Dude is not claiming innocence here. The cast list was available. The internet was functional. The names “James” and “Josh” are, under ordinary conditions, distinguishable from one another.

But come on, man.

Older Josh Brolin looks remarkably like James Brolin. They share the same granite-jawed presence, the same compact physical authority, and the same basic appearance of a man who could end a bar fight simply by standing up slowly.

The surname was right. The face was spiritually right. The only errors involved the first name, the generation, and the actual identity of the human being.

So the Dude had not, strictly speaking, discovered one extraordinary career.

He had accidentally programmed a Brolin family film festival.

And here is the thing: the mistake turned out to be more interesting than the truth would have been.

Share

James Brolin Versus the Satanic Lincoln Continental

The Car is one of those wonderful 1970s movies built around a premise so beautifully stupid that the only respectable response is total commitment.

This is not a haunted car. There is no tormented driver. There is no malfunctioning computer or government experiment gone wrong.

The car itself is an asshole.

It rolls into a desert community, murders people, honks with demonic enthusiasm, and generally behaves like Satan decided horseback transportation lacked sufficient trunk space.

James Brolin plays Chief Deputy Wade Parent, and he plays the entire thing completely straight. That is why the movie works.

He does not wink at the camera. He does not behave as though he is too sophisticated for the material. He treats the deaths, the terror, and his responsibility to the town as entirely real.

Wade is decent, competent, protective, and human. He is not an indestructible action figure. He is a small-town lawman trying to keep people alive while confronting a vehicle that appears to have come directly from Hell’s fleet-management department.

The film arrived in the post-Jaws era, when Hollywood executives looked around the natural and manufactured world and asked which everyday object could be turned into an unstoppable killing machine.

The shark had been taken.

The skyscraper had been taken.

Someone looked into the parking lot and said, “How about a Lincoln?”

And yet, for all its cheese, The Car has atmosphere. The desert feels isolated. The horn is genuinely unnerving. The black automobile has real physical presence. James Brolin gives the movie the solid center it needs.

It is earnest cheese, man.

Earnest cheese ages much better than smug cheese.

Josh Brolin Versus the Human Monster

Josh Brolin’s Monsignor Jefferson Wicks in Wake Up Dead Man is almost the moral opposite of Wade Parent.

Wade’s authority exists to protect a community.

Wicks’s authority exists to control one.

He is brusque, domineering, self-certain, and easy to dislike. He has the presence of a man who has never entered a room without assuming that everybody else’s job is to become quieter.

Brolin is very good at this kind of character because he does not need to advertise the menace. He simply occupies the space. The voice stays controlled. The posture stays firm. The certainty does most of the violence for him.

Wicks understands how to turn cruelty into moral clarity, domination into leadership, and resentment into a kind of spiritual loyalty program.

In The Car, evil arrives from outside town with tinted windows and no license plate.

In Wake Up Dead Man, evil has a congregation and knows exactly where to stand for the lighting.

James Brolin’s Wade becomes more sympathetic as pressure reveals his humanity. Josh Brolin’s Wicks becomes more repellent as the story reveals what his authority is actually doing to the people around him.

One man stands between the town and the monster.

The other man may be why the town needs protection in the first place.

Walter considered this for a moment.

“So one Brolin saves the community, and the other Brolin is a community standards violation.”

Crude, but essentially accurate.

Subscribe now

Two Brolins, Two Versions of the American Man

The fascinating part is that both actors use roughly the same physical instrument.

They are broad, restrained, square-jawed men who look immediately authoritative. Neither needs to shout to establish control. Both can suggest stored force simply by remaining still.

But the moral meaning of that authority has changed.

James Brolin’s solidity tells the audience: this man may save us.

Josh Brolin’s solidity often asks: should we have trusted this man in the first place?

That is partly a difference between the actors, but it is also a difference between eras.

A 1977 genre thriller could present a fundamentally decent lawman with relatively little irony. The modern mystery is more suspicious of the patriarch standing at the center of the room. It wants to know where his authority came from, who benefits from it, and how many people had to keep quiet so he could continue appearing righteous.

Maude would probably describe this as a generational shift in the semiotics of masculine power.

The Dude would describe it as one guy protecting the rug and the other guy peeing on it while delivering a sermon about personal responsibility.

The Josh Brolin Career for People Who Skipped the Capes

The Dude is largely ignorant of superhero cinema. Somewhere along the way, Josh Brolin became a large purple labor-management dispute with a magic glove, but this publication is not qualified to comment on intergalactic jewelry.

Fortunately, his career outside that genre is rich enough to keep a person occupied for quite a while.

The essential starting point is No Country for Old Men, where Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a capable, stubborn man who finds drug money and makes the sort of decision that seems reasonable for approximately nine minutes.

It was the role that showed what mature Josh Brolin could really do. He could look like an old-fashioned hero while allowing arrogance, fear, intelligence, and fatal miscalculation to coexist underneath.

From there, he became one of the great screen interpreters of compromised American masculinity.

In Milk, he played Dan White as a man collapsing under grievance and humiliation. In American Gangster, his authority became institutional corruption. In Sicario, he turned casual clothing and conversational manners into something deeply sinister.

Then there is the comedy.

In Hail, Caesar!, Brolin is a studio fixer attempting to impose order on a business populated almost entirely by lunatics. In Inherent Vice, he plays a detective who is threatening, ridiculous, hungry, wounded, and possibly operating in a completely different movie from everyone else.

He also brings weathered authority to True Grit, Dune, and Outer Range.

The remarkable thing is that his most interesting career did not arrive through a smooth child-star ascent. It emerged in middle age, when filmmakers realized that his heroic appearance was most useful when complicated, compromised, or turned slightly rotten.

The Mistake That Tied the Double Feature Together

Had the Dude correctly read the cast list before watching the movies, these would have been two unrelated films.

One would have been an enjoyable piece of 1970s techno-horror cheese about a demonic automobile.

The other would have been a modern murder mystery featuring Josh Brolin as a human being far less likable than the car.

But by getting it wrong, the Dude noticed something else.

The resemblance.

The inherited screen presence.

The changing meaning of masculine authority across two generations.

The difference between reassurance and menace.

The error tied the two movies together.

It was the rug.

So no, Josh Brolin did not begin his career in 1977 by fighting a satanic Lincoln Continental. The Dude regrets the error.

But James Brolin played the man who stood between the town and the monster. Nearly fifty years later, his son played the man everyone in town might reasonably want dead.

Different Brolins.

Same jaw.

Opposite moral direction.

Sometimes you throw a gutter ball and it still tells you something about the lane, man.

The Brolins abide.