Trump’s Swamp Just Got a Whole Lot Bigger and Swampier

“Drain the swamp,” Donald Trump said many times—mostly in his first race in 2016, but also in 2020 and 2024. To a certain kind of low-information person who has been conditioned to believe that everybody in Washington is corrupt and in it for themselves, the message resonated well enough that, with the help of the right-wing echo chamber, the man who has spent his entire adult life cheating people and lying about it convinced enough voters that he would be the scimitar-wielding enemy of corruption.

MAGA America still believes this, because Trump has convinced those folks, through further blatant and obvious lies, that he was the victim of the most sinister persecution in American political history. All the work of the swamp.

Back on planet Earth, meanwhile, we saw many instances this week of the Trump swamp in action, and it’s far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before in this country. Of course every week of this presidency so far has been the equivalent of a fetid, mosquito-infested morass, but this week was different because some of his hench people had to go up to Capitol Hill and answer a few questions, and we saw on full wretched display the three ugly faces of MAGA-style swampiness.

But we must start with Trump himself and that Qatari 747, which he intends to use as Air Force One and then transfer it to his presidential library foundation upon leaving office. It’s not possible to overstate how corrupt this is. The $400 million figure you see quoted in the media is the market value of the luxury jumbo jet right now; that is, the size of the bribe. But it will cost a billion, maybe more, to reconfigure.

This was too blatant even for the likes of Ben Shapiro, but other liars reliably leapt to Trump’s defense. Wrote Ann Coulter: “I can’t wait for the press to find out about France’s so-called ‘gift’ of the Statue of Liberty, accepted in 1886 by then-President Grover Cleveland.”

Right. As if Cleveland put the statue in his backyard and started living in it. It was a gift to the United States, not to Cleveland. Coulter isn’t that stupid. She’s a lawyer. She’s just lying and provoking. What else is new, I guess, but it just shows the cynical depths these people will go to in order to keep the MAGA base in a state of rage.

Which brings us to Swamp Creature Pam Bondi, who approved the gift, calling it “legally permissible.” That’s total nonsense, made worse by the fact that the attorney general once lobbied for Qatar. But why should this surprise us? The New York Times reported Friday that Bondi dumped between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares in Trump’s media company on April 2, the day Trump announced his crazy tariffs (though it’s unknown whether she sold them before the announcement, which could indicate she acted on inside knowledge, or afterward).

Corruption is just one face of this swampdom. Tragicomic evasive incompetence is another. Exhibit A this week was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Capitol Hill testimony, in which he dodged questions about his track record on vaccines and ended up saying, “I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” Remember, this is the man who runs the federal agency that is the chief dispenser of policy and advice about public health.

Kennedy also showed he knew next to nothing about the agency he allegedly runs. Maryland Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks asked him about a program of Health and Human Services that is meant to fight sudden infant death syndrome. Where, she wondered, is this program housed?

He took two incorrect stabs at an answer. Finally, Alsobrooks had to tell him that it was part of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics and a philanthropist on intellectual disability issues with few peers in American history, was his aunt.

But the third and worst face of thuggish swampery is plain cruelty, and here, no one can come close to Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary. She traipsed up to Capitol Hill this week, where Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia asked her some questions about Andry Hernández Romero, the gay man from Venezuela whom the Trump administration sent down to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in early April. The administration asserts that Hernández Romero was a member of Tren de Agua but has advanced little evidence to support that charge. He has no criminal record, and the U.S. government determined that he had a credible claim that he needed asylum.

Garcia simply asked Noem to confirm that he hadn’t been killed:

“Would you commit to just letting his mother know, as a mother to mother, if Andry is alive?”

“Our asylum applications are different than the granting of asylum, and I don’t know the specifics of this individual case. This individual is in El Salvador, and the appeal would be best made to the president and to the government of El Salvador.”

Nice. And now she wants to have a reality TV show in which immigrants compete for U.S. citizenship. Not making this up.

These people aren’t draining any swamp. They are the swamp. I could go on. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard this week fired two veteran intelligence professionals because they wrote an assessment that was at odds with Trump’s rationale for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. And now she wants to put James Comey “behind bars” for a stupid Instagram post of a photo of seashells forming the numbers “8647,” which Bondi took to mean he was calling for Trump’s assassination. Comey later deleted the post and apologized, saying he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

Neither did I. I always thought “86” just means to eject or toss someone or thing, as in, “I 86’d that drunk barfly” or “I 86’d that tattered old coat.” Any other administration would have accepted Comey’s apology and let it go. But in Trumpland, Comey’s crime wasn’t a mere Instagram post. It’s that he is the enemy. And because he is the enemy, the regime is completely justified in dangling a prison term over his head. And so things go in authoritarian swamps, when the minions fear that Dear Leader has been offended.

Nicolle Wallace had Scott Galloway on her MSNBC show Thursday. She began by asking him what he makes of this moment in which we find ourselves. Galloway, a business professor and popular podcaster, could have zigged in any number of directions with that open-ended question, so I was interested to see the direction he settled on: “I think we essentially have become a kleptocracy that would make Putin blush. I mean, keep in mind that in the first three months, the Trump family has become $3 billion wealthier, so that’s a billion dollars a month.”

Stop and think about that. A presidency lasts, of course, 48 months (at most, we hope). Trump has been enriching himself at an unprecedented scale since day one of his second term—actually, since just before, given that he announced the $Trump meme coin a few days before swearing to protect and defend the Constitution.

And now, we know that he’s having a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in two weeks for his top $Trump investors, whose identities we may never know. How might these people influence his decisions? This whole arrangement is blatantly corrupt. And The New York Times had a terrific report this week about Don Jr. and Eric going around the world (Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia) making deals from which their father will profit.

I read these stories, as I’m sure you do, and I think to myself: How on earth is he getting away with this? It’s the right question, but we usually concentrate on the wrong answer.

For most people, they think first of the Democrats, because they’re the opposition, and by the traditions of our system they’re the ones who are supposed to stop this, or at least raise hell about it. Second, we might think about congressional Republicans, who, if they were actually upholding their own oaths to the Constitution, would be expressing alarm about this.

They both shoulder some blame, but neither of those is really the answer. Every time I ask myself how he gets away with this, I remember: Oh, right. It’s the right-wing media. Duh.

After the election, I wrote a column that went viral about how the right-wing media made Trump’s election possible. Fox News, most conspicuously, but also Newsmax, One America News Network, Sinclair, and the rest, along with the swarm of right-wing podcasters and TikTokers, created a media environment in which Trump could do no wrong and Kamala Harris no right.

Think back—I know you’ve repressed it—to that horror-clown-show Madison Square Garden rally Trump held the week before the election. It was, as the Times put it, a “carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism.” A generation or two ago, that would have finished off his campaign. Last year? It made no difference. No—it helped. And it helped because a vast propaganda network—armed with press passes and First Amendment protections—spent a week gabbing about how cool and manly it was.

Newsflash: They’re still at it.

First of all, Fox News is basically the megaphone of the Trump administration. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, key administration officials, reports Media Matters for America, appeared on Fox 536 times. That, obviously, is 5.36 times per day; in other words, assuming that a cable news “day” runs from 6 a.m. to midnight, that’s one administration official about every three hours. I’ve seen occasional clips where the odd host challenges them on this point or that, but in essence, this is a propaganda parade.

I tried to do some googling to see how Fox is covering the meme coin scandal. Admitting that Google doesn’t catch everything, the answer seems to be that it’s not. On the network’s website, there was a bland January 18 article reporting that he’d launched it; an actually interesting January 22 piece summarizing a critical column by The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, who charged that it was an invitation to bribery; and finally, an April 24 report that the coin surged in value after Trump announced the upcoming dinner—“critics” were given two paragraphs, deep in the article. (Interesting side note: Predictably, other figures on the far right have aped Trump by launching their own coins, among them former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley.)

But it’s not just Fox, and it’s not just on corruption. It’s all of them, and it’s on everything. You think any of them are mentioning Trump’s campaign promise to bring prices down on day one, or pointing out that all “persons” in the United States have a right to due process? Or criticizing his shambolic tariffs policies? I’m not saying there’s never criticism. There is. But the thrust of the coverage is protective and defensive: “Expert Failure & the Trump Boom” was the theme of one recent Laura Ingraham segment.

So sure, blame Democrats to some extent. A number of them are increasingly trying to bring attention to the corruption story, but there’s always more they could be doing. (By the way, new DNC Chair Ken Martin announced the creation one month ago of a new “People’s Cabinet” to push back hard against Trump. Anybody heard of it since?)

And of course, blame congressional Republicans. Their constitutional, ethical, and moral failures are beyond the pale, and they’re all cowards.

But neither of those groups is the reason Trump can throw a meme coin party and nothing happens; can send legal U.S. residents to brutal El Salvador prisons; can detain students for weeks because they wrote one pro-Palestinian op-ed; can shake down universities and law firms; can roil the markets with his idiotic about-faces on tariffs; can whine that bringing down prices is harder than he thought; can empower his largest donor, the richest man in the world, to take a meat-ax to the bureaucracy in a way that makes no sense to anyone, and so much more.

It’s all because Trump and his team operate within the protective cocoon of a media-disinformation environment that allows just enough criticism to retain “credibility” but essentially functions as a Ministry of Truth for the administration that would have shocked Orwell himself.

And just remember—a billion dollars a month.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.

It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.

Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).

So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.

Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.

So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.

It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)

Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?

This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.

What are the others? Watergate? It was awful in different ways, but of course Trump is worse than Richard Nixon in all those ways too. Teapot Dome? Please—a tiny little rigged contract, and it didn’t even involve Warren Harding directly, just his interior secretary. Credit Mobilier? Run-of-the-mill bribes by a railroad company, again not involving President Grant directly, just his vice president.

And yes, I’ve been thinking this week of the Lincoln Bedroom scandal. In 1995–96, the Clintons invited a lot of people to spend a night in the famous chamber. Many of them made large donations to the Democratic Party. It was unseemly. But it wasn’t illegal. And it certainly didn’t line the Clintons’ personal pockets. But if you were around at the time, you remember as I do the swollen outrage of Republicans about how relentlessly corrupt the Clintons were.

Today? Crickets.

Finally: Before we leave this topic, I want you to go to GetTrumpMemes.com and just look at those illustrations of Trump. There’s a big one in the middle of him with his fist raised, echoing the image from his attempted assassination. Then off to the right, there’s Trump seated at the head of a dining table.

In both, he looks about 50. The artist has airbrushed a good quarter-century off his face, in terms of jowl fat and wrinkles and accumulated orange pancake. And in the dominant, middle image … what do we think Trump’s waist size is, about 46, 48? This Trump is about a 34. Maybe even a svelte 32. It’s hysterically funny. These are probably the most creepily totalitarian images of Trump I’ve ever seen, and yes, I understand, that’s a big statement. But even Stalin’s visual hagiographers didn’t try to make him look skinny.

I digress. Let’s keep our eyes on the real prize here. This May 22 dinner is a high crime and misdemeanor. A president of the United States can’t use the office to enrich himself in this way, from potentially anonymous donors for whom he might do favors. This is as textbook as corruption gets.

New York Times and Washington Post, put your best investigative reporters on this and place their stories on your front pages. MSNBC, hammer on this—you haven’t been. Democrats, talk about this every day, several times a day. Do not let Trump’s sewer standards jade us. Make sure the people know.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

As we approach the 100-day mark of Trump 2.0, we see, Lord knows, much to worry about. But one reassuring development has been that, by and large, the judicial branch has stood tough against the administration’s lawlessness. Federal judges James Boasberg and Paula Xinis are early heroes of the second Trump regime. I’m sure there are more who’ve escaped my notice.

I’m old enough to remember when the name J. Harvie Wilkinson III made me shake. He was elevated to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, was affiliated with the Federalist Society, and he always, on lists of possible Supreme Court nominees, occupied one of the hard-right slots. But now Wilkinson too has become a voice of sanity, writing the three-judge ruling handed down Thursday night that rebuked the Trump administration in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.

The ruling is unequivocal and, as we shall see, went out of its way to alert Americans to the constitutional threat the administration poses. But it does something more important: It returns the spotlight to the Supreme Court, and specifically to Chief Justice John Roberts, pressuring them to stand up to this madness. And so, one of the key controversies roiling our democracy, from this case to others, is this: What will Roberts do?

We’ll return to that. But first, let’s review Wilkinson’s judgment. Here are the money quotes:

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting the right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.… This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from the courthouse still hold dear.”

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail” in court.

“Now the [executive and judicial] branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that diminishes both.”

Notice in that first quote the use of the word “residents.” Not citizens. This is a clear recognition that the language of the Fourteenth Amendment—specifically the due process clause—extends protections not to “citizens” but to “persons.” Abrego Garcia has constitutional rights. Period. His character and his immigration status are totally irrelevant.

The Wilkinson opinion will inevitably toss the matter back to the Supreme Court, which ruled on April 10 that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. The court’s order was pretty mealy-mouthed. The key sentence reads: “For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

Now the court will be compelled to take a stronger stand. Can the nation’s highest court possibly allow this situation to continue? The government of the United States admits Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake and then says it’s powerless to return him, that only El Salvador can do that; and El Salvador says it’s powerless to return him, that only the United States can. If the court’s six conservative justices have any shred of dignity and respect for the role they’re supposed to play in this democracy, they cannot let this stand. It’s a fundamental issue.

Other equally fundamental issues are headed the court’s way. It is weighing what to do about Trump’s ability to fire executive agency heads unilaterally. Just recently, the court blocked the reinstatement of two executive agency officials Trump had fired—but it did so only temporarily, while the court considers whether Trump had the authority to fire them. Still, that order was a temporary win for Trump—and was written by Roberts himself.

And just Thursday, we learned that the court will hear arguments on birthright citizenship on May 15. A decision will likely follow in June or July. This, again, would seem on the surface to be as open-and-shut as the Abrego Garcia matter, and for much the same reason: The Fourteenth Amendment says “persons,” and it states quite plainly in its very first sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

We seem not to be confronted with legal questions. Those are settled. As U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman recently ruled, in deciding against a Trump administration motion, “No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation.”

There remain only political questions, the chief one being: What feat of originalist–unitary executive legerdemain will the court’s conservatives perform to jam the square peg of Trump’s goals into the round holes of the United States Constitution?

Whether they will do so is up to Roberts. Once upon a quaint old time, the chief justice would cajole his colleagues into consensus on matters of historical import. Earl Warren made sure that the ruling on Brown v. Board was 9–0, because he wanted the country to see that the court was united on this great historical question of segregation versus integration. One doubts 9–0 is possible on these major cases today, with these two guys hanging around. But Roberts at least should have the power to steer a majority to uphold the ideas that words mean what they say and that this is not a nation of one-man rule. Roberts’s name will live in history, either alongside brave jurists like Boasberg and Xinis or in infamy, alongside Roger Taney and, well, Clarence Thomas.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

We don’t really learn anything new about Donald Trump anymore. He’s the same old liar and buffoon he’s been for 50 years. But sometimes we relearn the stuff we already knew in ways that are so shocking that we have to pause and take stock.

One of the old lessons we relearned this week has to do with Trump’s adolescent need for constant praise, and the abject willingness of his sycophants to provide it without his having to ask—even, or especially, when the reality screams for rebuke.

This is a crucial point that needs to be widely understood, and will be by those with a living memory of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The operating principle of such regimes was this: The worse actual conditions were, the more fulsome the propaganda had to be. The crops yields were excellent, comrades! Our cars are far superior to the capitalists’! Prisons? What prisons?

Which brings us back to Trump’s America, which isn’t so different in key respects from Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Here we have a week when Trump’s bumbling, his stupidity, his willed ignorance of history, and his utter refusal to think through policy have never been more fully on display. With all this tariff flip-flopping, he very nearly launched a global economic crisis. As it is, he personally—no one else—cost investors, from large institutional ones to you and me, trillions of dollars. And the lower tariff rates he announced Wednesday as the bond market was about to explode are still the highest since the infamous Smoot-Hawley years.

It was a disaster in every way. And as such, it required an especially intense degree of obsequiousness.

Bill Ackman: “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

Karoline Leavitt (to White House reporters): “Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”

And the winner of this week’s Stalin Prize, Stephen Miller: “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.”

For good measure, not exactly on the topic of the tariffs but nevertheless a Stalin Prize contender, we had Pam Bondi at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday: “President, we’ve had some great wins in the last few days. You know, you were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority.”

Wait, what? “President”? Not “Mr. President”? Why? Because it’s a little closer to “El Presidente”? For the record, Trump won a plurality, not a majority, and he got four million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. But there’s more: In her next sentence, Bondi invoked “U.S. Americans.” I haven’t heard that one since Miss Teen South Carolina in 2007.

If these people are right that Trump was acting the whole time with great intention, then we must seriously consider the allegation that he was manipulating the market with his Wednesday morning social media post about now being “A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” If he knew that morning that he was going to announce a pause that afternoon—an announcement that he had to know would send the market skyrocketing—then there’s little question that his post constituted market manipulation. The best argument in Trump’s defense here is a pretty pitiful one: that he’s so incapable of thinking more than 15 minutes ahead that it’s hard to believe he knew in the morning what he was going to do in the afternoon.

Regardless, we’re in an unprecedentedly chilling era in American politics. Literally never in American history have presidential aides and supporters spoken quite like this, employing the kind of flattery one usually sees in totalitarian regimes (which are a couple ticks worse in general than authoritarian ones).

What does it tell us about the future? Trump is going to get worse. I think we can say that with confidence. Each week so far has been worse than the last, in terms of the assaults on democracy. His executive order this week concerning Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs is terrifying—perhaps the most frightening thing he’s done yet in his war on political enemies. Telling the Justice Department to investigate specific individual Americans because of their political activity arguably goes further in turning the state into an instrument of his personal will than anything else he’s done.

Bondi said we should rest assured that the Justice Department alone will make any prosecutorial decisions. But the mere fact that Justice is going to use resources to investigate these two men, who are guilty of nothing more than political advocacy Trump didn’t like, has terrifying implications for every U.S. American out there.

So, yes, things will get even worse. And as they do, the sycophancy will grow ever more insistent and unapologetic. That’s how it works. These attempts to win the Stalin Prize are so pathetic they’re almost funny—but each one of them is also another assault on democratic values and customs. We can’t forget this.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.