It was 19 months ago, following the embarrassing spectacle in the Oval Office in which Donald Trump and his then-equally tubby vice president ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that I said in this space that it had become clear that Trump was on Russia’s side in its invasion of Ukraine.
Darline Graham Nordone did her candidacy no favors at yesterday’s debate when she directly admitted her ignorance on national security issues. Her critics seized on it as disqualifying, but if we actually care about what we say we care about in politicians, they’re wrong.
Our present preoccupation with living the Boy Who Cried Wolf’s life forces me to write the same column every so often. This week’s column is brought to you courtesy of revelations about President Trump’s secret plane swap forced by an Iranian threat.
I didn’t know him personally. He was never my senator. But the passing of Lindsey Graham really has struck me. The more I think about his passing — and the responses from those who long worked with him — the more I think I know why.
Our blowhard, none-too-bright president wanted it to be clear, and he said so on his little message board on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
It needed to be done, but the adults hadn’t done it, so I thought I would. The result was a useful lesson. One that was painful both to me, who was guilty, and to many others, who weren’t. I never would have supposed that many years later it would become the kind of mistake the president of the United States would repeat on a much larger scale.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was obvious, wanted to be as far away from this stinker as he could get. He didn’t, it seemed, want to be soiled with whatever the Secretary of Defense (“secretary of war” in his own delusions of grandeur) had been rolling in.
It’s doubly tragic that just days before Easter there’s need to address the appalling fact that more and more countries in the world, and a dozen states, now have laws that allow the killing of their citizens and residents.
If you’ve been conscious at all the last 10 years or so, it’s been pretty tough in American politics. Outright assassinations, attempted assassinations, and the type of conflict that could turn violent at any time. Many people think they cannot have a conversation across the political aisle, so to speak, without harming or ending friendships, and even family relationships. We’ve all experienced the tension here; no one we know has been free of its effects.
So far, 2026 brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s legendary sigh, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s said to have been uttered when her doorbell rang, but it has other uses. Applied to our current year it makes Parker seem a prophet (though her politics and choices of friends tended to be terrible).