Subject to Change Newsletter

America at 250 is an everyday marvel in so many ways, especially if you’re white and have a little money. We have air conditioning and antibiotics and the internet. We have abundant choices at the supermarket. We have fuel-efficient SUVs that function as rolling living rooms. We have limitless music at the flick of a finger on our cells. We have the arts in every possible iteration, and brilliant history museums that curate our warts-and-all journey.

An inevitable press briefing a few days from now: (Trump is hydraulically lowered into his seat.) “Mr. President, are you planning to drain the Reflecting Pool and start over? There are reports - ” “Quiet, Piggy! I know you’ve been down there stealing patriotic paint chips. Maybe we oughta cuff you. And gimme a smile for a change.

At the risk of getting canceled by readers who passionately love Graham Platner - the Democratic macho bro running for the Senate in pivotal Maine - and at the risk of getting canceled by readers who passionately hate his guts, I’ll try here to assess him with a wee bit of nuance on a wee patch of middle ground. This is risky because our polarized political climate does not abide shades of gray.

I’ll go out on a limb and assume that you didn’t see our corpulent Caligula bellow like a stuck pig when his toxic lies were fact-checked yesterday on Meet the Press. The landslide verdict on this guy has already been rendered - outside his cult he’s a disaster of historic proportions - so why should we spend even a millisecond watching him yank off his mic and waddle away? But I have to confess that one moment made me smile.

The rise of Texas' Senate GOP candidate is proof of our moral and ethical downfall. I’m old enough to remember when conservatives routinely preached a good game about the importance of morality in politics. This was back in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was known to…how shall I say this…fancy the ladies.

MAGA propagandists and rightist Republicans have long mastered the dark art of 24/7 attack. Democrats, by contrast, have long been wimps at political warfare - fussing over nuance, cowering on defense, and misbelieving all too often that it’s better to engage the voter’s intellect than aim for the gut. But right now the blue party has a golden opportunity to pound a simplistic but accurate message - assuming (and this may be delusional) that Dems have the balls and discipline to act.

Normally I’d rather boil my eyeballs than read a compendium of quotes from MAGA voters. The New York Times, in particular, likes to torture those of us who dwell in factual reality. Every few months there’s another “focus group” of a dozen or so randos, and whenever I try to parse what they’ve opined I am instantly struck with the sensation that I’ve been seat-buckled for a trip to Mars.

I am guilty of sabotage. Whenever I cruise a bookstore and see one of James Comey’s novels, I flip it backward to hide the cover. It’s my powerless way of punishing him for his original sin. I sympathize with the guy - up to a point. It’s detestable, if not laughable, that the MAGA regime has twice indicted the former FBI director just to sate Trump’s revenge fantasies.

I tuned up C-Span on Saturday night (not my first choice for a weekend binge) with the expectation that the White House Correspondents Association dinner would be darkly fascinating, like the way a multi-car crash commands attention when we rubberneck. The very idea that the Washington press corps would actually break bread with the demagogue who’s bent on destroying them…even now, after everything that’s happened, writing those words makes me sick enough to pine for Dramamine. But wow.

Whenever Trump slimes Christianity, as is his wanton wont these days, purporting to replace it with the Church of MAGA, I’m reminded of a line of dialogue delivered by a tempestuous artist in the film Hannah and Her Sisters: “If Jesus came back, and saw what’s going on His name, He’d never stop throwing up.” It's no surprise that a seriously disturbed individual afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder would devolve to the point where he thinks of himself as God - the number one...