“On this night, however, Bob Wright got home late, and saw what he saw,” Smigel wrote in an Instagram post.

“What he saw” was “Conspiracy Theory Rock,” a Schoolhouse Rock parody about how a handful of companies owned a gigantic chunk of U.S. media. The cartoon depicted GE swallowing the NBC peacock, Westinghouse eating the CBS eye logo, Mickey Mouse dining on the ABC logo, and more. Peter Jennings anchors the news in mouse ears. There’s a banquet scene, and one of the logos served up as food is CNN’s. I remember watching it live (I was 12, so a lot of it went over my head), but I forgot about it until a few years ago when I saw a post about how it had been “censored” from future broadcasts by NBC.

For his part, Smigel was amazed that the cartoon was allowed to air in the first place, but wasn’t particularly surprised that it was cut from reruns. Smigel said that the segment went through a notes process “beyond the Standards dept & up the executive ladder.” In 2002’s Live From New York, an oral history of the show, NBC vice president for late night Rick Ludwin recalled that he “immediately passed it on up the line, to whoever was in charge, because I wanted everyone to know what was going on.”

But when the show aired as a rerun three months later, the cartoon was gone.

“I didn’t think it worked comedically,” Michaels told the New York Daily News at the time, explaining why it got dropped from future airings of that episode. Wright, in Live From New York, was more straightforward: “It was just kind of a GE shot without any point to it.”

“Smigel, I remember, was all upset about it being taken out of the repeats,” said Ludwin. “I said, ‘Robert, it got on the air. You were not censored. It got on the first time.’ It got on once — but never again.”

(And while it’s not quite accurate to call the cartoon “banned,” it was apparently included in the 2006 Best of TV Funhouse DVD, it’s hard to blame Smigel or writer Adam McKay for feeling like it was.)

Nearly three decades later, two of the networks in that cartoon have the same owner. On Tuesday, Skydance closed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, putting CBS and CNN under nepo baby billionaire David Ellison. His father, Larry Ellison, is the eighth richest person in the world, and is the largest shareholder in Oracle, which is one of the major managing investors in TikTok’s U.S. joint venture.

The cartoon was right in 1998, and it’s only gotten worse since.

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A day earlier, on October 7, the Washington Post had published a story about a 2005 video of Trump on a hot mic with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.

“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump told Bush as they ogled a woman from the set of Days of Our Lives, where Trump was making a cameo. You know the video. We all do. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

So yeah, it made sense that a mint brand decided to create some public distance from the soon-to-be-president. And it had company. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said he and his wife, Cindy, wouldn’t vote for Trump. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Trump to withdraw. NPR had a running list of Republicans calling on Trump to step aside, and by Saturday night, it had 30 names on it. For that weekend, Trump’s political career seemed to be on life support, and Republicans everywhere were confronting a belief that Trump couldn’t win, and were trying to figure out how to limit the down-ballot damage.

And while that weekend usually gets remembered as the moment we found out that Trump’s claim from earlier in the year that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” was more or less true, I’m not positive that’s exactly what happened. The public initially reacted to the tape with genuine disgust. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken that weekend had Hillary Clinton up by 11 points. And once the tape came out, a number of women came forward to accuse Trump of doing the things he’d been caught on tape bragging about.

This could have been the end of the Trump era. And for one weekend, it looked not just possible, but likely. Ultimately, Trump was bailed out by the Republican Party, which had learned to fear Trump’s biggest supporters, who were uninterested in any talk of Trump dropping out. By Monday, the Republican National Committee was back to being in “full coordination” with the Trump campaign. And by Wednesday, several Republicans who’d withdrawn their support were back on board.

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But for one weekend, Republicans told him to quit

The Post’s story went up around 4 p.m. ET on Friday. Trump’s initial response was to dismiss it as “locker room banter,” and then to argue that “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close,” before apologizing “if anyone was offended.” (A real classic of the genre.)

But it seemed to be too late for Trump. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) condemned Trump on Twitter, writing, “Donald’s comments were vulgar, egregious & impossible to justify. No one should ever talk about any woman in those terms, even in private.” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) went on Fox 13 in Salt Lake City, saying, “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president.”

“My wife and I, we have a 15-year-old daughter, and if I can’t look her in the eye and tell her these things, I can’t endorse this person,” said Chaffetz, adding, “And why should we tolerate this? This is the Presidency of the United States of America: I just can’t do it.”

Trump tried to stop the bleeding by posting a video just after midnight on Saturday.

“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong and I apologize. I’ve traveled the country talking about change for America but my travels have also changed me. I’ve spent time with grieving mothers who have lost their children, laid-off workers whose jobs have gone to other countries and people from all walks of life who just want a better future. I have gotten to know the great people of our country and I have been humbled by the faith they have placed in me. I pledge to be a better man tomorrow and will never, ever let you down. Let’s be honest. We’re living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we’re facing today. We’re losing our jobs. We’re less safe than we were eight years ago and Washington is totally broken. Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground. I’ve said some foolish things but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”

(That debate, you may remember, was the one where Trump lurked around the stage and threatened to imprison her.)

Nothing was working, and big names in the Republican Party were beginning to rally behind Pence. Trump lost Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID)’s endorsement on Saturday, with Crapo urging Trump to “step aside and allow the Republican Party to put forward a conservative candidate like Mike Pence who can defeat Hillary Clinton.” Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the future Senate majority leader, pushed for speed: “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately.” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) tweeted, “It would be wise for [Trump] to step aside and allow Mike Pence to serve as our party’s nominee.”

And it looked like the party itself was withdrawing its support, too. That Saturday, Politico reported that the RNC emailed a vendor for its “Victory” program, dedicated to electing Trump, with the subject line “Hold on all projects.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said he was “sickened” by Trump’s comments, and disinvited the future president from an event in Wisconsin that they were supposed to do together.

“With less than a month to go, a major party is walking away from its nominee,” read the headline of an October 8 story in the Washington Post. Brutal! So what happened?

While things didn’t necessarily look great for Trump polling-wise, his “MAGA” supporters were still firmly in his corner, and that made efforts to oust him difficult. On one hand, if you stand by Trump, you run the risk of being seen as a Trump apologist for those comments, potentially losing some voters. On the other hand, if you don’t stand by Trump, you risk alienating his supporters, who you need to win down-ballot races. Ryan got brutally heckled at the Wisconsin event he had disinvited Trump from. “Shame on you!” and “We want Trump!” calls broke out.

A Morning Consult/Politico poll taken right after the story broke found that only 12% of Republicans surveyed thought Trump should end his campaign.1 Seventy-four percent of Republicans wanted the party to continue supporting him. And it looked like the party wasn’t going to have much of a choice, as Trump was adamant that there was “zero chance I’ll quit.“

Most of Trump’s supporters had already baked the creep factor into their support for him. And on the night the tape came out, Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition explained why Trump’s comments wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for evangelicals:

“But people of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, grow the economy, appoint conservative judges and oppose the Iran nuclear deal. ... I think a 10-year-old tape of a private conversation with a TV talk show host ranks pretty low on their hierarchy of their concerns.”

The GOP denounced, then immediately fell back in line behind Trump

On Monday, Ryan told House Republicans that while he wouldn’t personally defend or campaign for Trump, they should “do what’s best for you in your district.” By that evening, RNC chair Reince Priebus told members, “I want to make it very clear that the RNC is in full coordination with the Trump campaign and we have a great relationship with them.”

Things went from “Hold on all projects” to “A great relationship” in 48 hours.

On Tuesday, Fischer walked back her criticism of Trump, telling a Nebraska radio station, “I never said I was not voting for our Republican ticket.” And while that’s technically true, it was just three days earlier that she’d called on him to step aside. Still, sticking with him was “not a tough choice,” she said.

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) had also called on Trump to drop out of the race over the weekend, but on Wednesday, his campaign said that he “has always said he will vote for the Republican Party nominee.” That week, Thune, Mr. “Effective Immediately,” told a local paper, “I’m certainly not going to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

As Alex Shephard wrote at the time for The New Republic, “Republicans are crawling back to Trump.”

The story didn’t go away, but GOP resistance to Trump did. Had they held firm in defiance of what the MAGA movement was pushing, Republicans would have almost certainly lost the election (the ballots had already been printed and Trump wasn’t going to drop out), but would have been able to tank Trump and regroup for the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election with a party built around something other than Trump and his cult of personality. Instead, I think this became the moment when the Republican Party fully surrendered to the Trump wing. Over the following weeks, with a handful of notable exceptions, the party would largely be in Trump’s corner, promoting him as the best available option.

Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem, who’d withdrawn his Trump endorsement after the tape, was back on Team Trump by October 20, saying, “It isn’t even close. I overwhelmingly support Trump’s policies and believe that Clinton’s policies will seriously damage the nation, perhaps forever.” On October 24, Crapo did a 180, explaining that “the choice we have is between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Given that choice, I will vote for the Republican ticket, Trump and Pence. We must elect a president who will appoint strong Supreme Court justices who will interpret the Constitution as it was written and who will help lead us to a stronger free market economy and a more limited constitutional government.”

On November 1, Ryan told Fox News that he voted early and for the Trump-Pence ticket.

And on the night of October 26, 19 days after declaring “I’m out,” Chaffetz tweeted this:

Two days later, at 12:57 p.m., Chaffetz tweeted again:

That’s how news of FBI Director James Comey’s infamous letter (that potentially won Trump the election) about newly discovered Hillary Clinton’s emails got made public... but that’s a story for another day.

There was never going to be a clean way to get rid of Trump

He was never going to be replaced on the ballot. At least not officially. The day after the Access Hollywood tape came out, CNN reported that replacing him was “practically impossible now because votes have already been cast.”

The party had a decision to make about what it wanted to be. It could sabotage Trump’s election in an act of self-preservation, throwing the election to Clinton, or it could get really comfortable with Trump being the face of the party. It chose the latter, and Trump eked out a win that came down to fewer than 78,000 votes in three states.

The Republicans who briefly condemned Trump have done remarkably well, working their way back into Trump’s good graces. Rubio, who said Trump’s comments were “impossible to justify,” is now the secretary of state. Crapo chairs the Senate Finance Committee. Thune is now the Senate majority leader.

A little more than four years later, Trump would once again find his political fate in the hands of the Republican Party after he tried and failed to carry out an autogolpe. Twice, the party had the opportunity to end Trump’s reign. Twice, it failed to do so, condemning and then welcoming him back with open arms.

In any case, my uncharacteristic detachment from my usual routine gave me the chance to see how “normies” (i.e. people who aren’t politics-obsessed weirdos like I am) may have heard about the hearing, and what they took away from it.

If, like me this week, you heard about this hearing via social media or just a stray article that made its way through your feed, you probably saw one specific highlight: Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) swung for the fences during his questioning of Smith, and... well... it didn’t go how he thought it would.

The short version (which you’ve probably seen) is that Schmitt claimed Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 and suggested he’d gone to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both Smith and Willis had been involved in investigating Donald Trump’s alleged crimes and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” he asked. Smith said no. Schmitt continued: “The day before, Fani Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor.” And Smith said that he had never met Willis during his time as special counsel, and he had definitely not been in attendance at that Hawks game.

Schmitt then whipped out a poster board that purported to show evidence that Smith had lied under oath.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself,” Schmitt said, dripping with smug confidence. And as you probably know by now, no, Smith wasn’t at that game. He was actually at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game that night. Schmitt seemed to have been confusing the Hawks (NBA team) with the Hawkeyes (NCAA team).

To use a basketball term here, Schmitt air-balled this one big time.

(Somewhat unrelated, but the Warriors-Hawks game Schmitt accused Smith of attending was the one where Steph Curry dropped 60 points, setting a season high. So, hey, I guess if you’re going to put a guy at the wrong basketball game, you might as well pick a good one.)

Now, this flub is notable for a couple of reasons. That morning, Axios’s Jim VandeHei reported that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” I find it hard to believe the timing was a coincidence. The story ran on the same day Schmitt would try to grab the headlines with a grandstanding moment in which he’d catch Smith in a lie, committing a crime. This was supposed to help propel Schmitt to political stardom in the GOP, but instead, he came away looking like a clown. Even after being corrected, fact-checked, and called out for all of this, Schmitt continued to insist that he was right, long after he’d been proven wrong. No surprises there.

To add to the egg on his face, there’s the additional irony that he’s the same guy who, back in August, accused Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed of not knowing ball for saying “Beat Ohio” in reference to Ohio State University (for the record, El-Sayed was right; University of Michigan and its fans regularly do say “Beat Ohio” when referring to OSU, sometimes as a bit of a taunt as Ohio State fans and alumni are known to get a bit touchy whenever someone doesn’t refer to it as “THE Ohio State University.” Hell, former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh even renamed a practice drill after the phrase).

And yes, all of this clearly is a story. It’s absolutely newsworthy that Schmitt botched his big moment on the day that Axios puffed him up. It’s newsworthy that he clearly thought this was such a slam dunk, and that guys like Benny Johnson and Sean Hannity rushed to post about it on social media, despite the fact that they had literally everything wrong. (Both later deleted their posts.) And yes, it’s newsworthy that Schmitt still won’t actually admit that he made a mistake.

But there was a lot more to the hearing that kind of got lost in the Schmitt show. And if you were paying attention to this as someone who doesn’t closely follow politics, you probably missed it. Smith said a lot of stuff that should shake the country to its core, but instead everyone ended up talking about Eric Schmitt.

And it’s not to say that news organizations ignored the other aspects of Smith’s testimony. They didn’t! But the whole thing got overshadowed by Schmitt’s moment. And I guess that the one thought I had as I read more about what happened during the rest of the hearing was that I kind of wish there was a way for news organizations to capitalize on the viral moment to help inform the public about everything else that happened, to use the viral moment specifically as an opportunity.

But to avoid contributing to the Schmittiness of this, I suppose I should also give a quick rundown of what Smith said during the hearing that I think more people should be aware of. So what did Smith actually say?

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Smith told the Senate that people are being threatened with prosecution for being seen as opposing the president

In his opening statement, T-minus about 60 minutes before Schmitt grabbed the spotlight, Smith told the committee this:

As with my appearance before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, I am prepared to answer your questions truthfully. I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives, and I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.

As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal prosecution because they are perceived to have opposed the president. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s longstanding core values and traditions.

History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It’s often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January of 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the agents, prosecutors, and staff who worked on my team, simply because of their unwavering dedication to the rule of law.

I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States. However, I remain confident that the rule of law will endure, because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths, despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.

Back in July, House Judiciary Chairman and alleged knower of a disgusting abuse scandal at THE Ohio State University Jim Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department, accusing him of knowingly making false statements in his December deposition. At issue are text messages that Smith’s team obtained involving 44 members of Congress, including Jordan. These texts were obtained through the National Archives in response to a request for White House phones. Since we live in bizarro-world, Todd Blanche, Trump’s defense attorney during Smith’s investigation, is now the attorney general. Every day is a new horror, basically.

I digress. Back to the hearing. Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked Smith whether whistleblowers who’d talked to Congress about Smith’s investigation should themselves be investigated. Smith said: “I’m not aware of any whistleblowers being investigated. I believe public servants should be protected. The members of my team, that you just mentioned, I’m extremely proud to have worked with them. And the fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.”

The hearing’s official title was “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters,” so it’s not exactly shocking that Republicans were on the attack here. So when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked why Smith’s investigators had wanted logs of who called whom, and when, for a group of Republican senators, Smith said that the records “corroborated evidence that we had that the president, President Donald Trump, and his co-conspirators were seeking to exploit the violence on January 6th in furtherance of their criminal scheme.” That’s wild! He was alleging that Trump and his co-conspirators tried to exploit the attack on the Capitol to advance their autocoup, calling Republican senators to get them to delay the certification. When asked to get specific, Smith pointed to a message between Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff and a former member of Congress, and one of the co-conspirators, saying Trump wanted his co-conspirators to call these Republican senators for help advancing the coup. “Co-conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, then sought to make those calls.”

Then there was Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), who was recently appointed to fill her brother Lindsey’s seat after he died in July. She pressed Smith about the subpoena for her brother’s phone records and the gag order that came with it. Smith gave an explanation that Lindsey Graham “was not a target of our investigation. And in fact, he likely would’ve been a witness in our case. Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making. He found them to be false.”

“Then why does the gag order say that disclosure of the subpoena would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence?” she asked.

“Because disclosure of that subpoena could result in Donald Trump attempting to intimidate witnesses as he had before and after,” Smith said. “We had an ample basis for that.”

“The evidence in question belonged to Lindsey and was in the possession of Verizon,” she said. “It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would be able to destroy the evidence you are seeking. Do you know what I think? I think you are just trying to bully my brother and other allies of President Trump. You caused my brother and a lot of other senators a lot of stress, and that makes me sick. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

This sort of... how dare you investigate Donald Trump’s crimes! attitude was a running theme of the hearing when Republican senators were given the floor.

And a lot of what Smith said during the hearing wasn’t particularly new. On Tuesday, he told the committee that his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” much like he did back in December. The difference here was that the December hearing was a closed-door deposition, and this was a public hearing available to anyone with an internet connection or TV.

(I read the transcript so you didn’t have to, and it’s still the most-read piece I’ve ever published here.)

Almost everything that traveled was about a basketball game

Mainstream news stories were mostly fine. Let’s give credit where it’s due. The Associated Press put Smith’s defense of his prosecutions and “a senator’s bungled attempt to accuse him of lying about a basketball game” in the same opening sentence. That’s totally okay. And I don’t have any gripes with how the Washington Post or ABC News covered the hearing, either.

Politico’s story ran under the headline “Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead.” By the next morning, though, it was clear that the general public wasn’t anywhere near as interested in Smith’s explosive claims about Trump’s crimes as they were with Schmitt’s faceplant. And I get it. Stories leading with Schmitt’s flub took over the top of Memeorandum and went viral. What’s Resonating, a newsletter that tracks which political clips over-perform, listed seven entries about the exchange, most of them on TikTok, with the most viral of them all getting 4.3 million views. According to right-wing media watchdog NewsBusters, the network evening newscasts barely covered the hearing at all: with ABC News giving it 32 seconds, NBC Nightly News doing “absolutely nothing on the hearing,” and CBS Evening News running “a 10-second commercial ticker.” CBS News’s own TikTok clip of the flub got 2.4 million views. (NewsBusters wanted more coverage not because it was damning for Republicans and Trump, but because they believed that the networks buried the GOP case against Smith, which is just a wild thing to believe. The flub buried that, too.)

To be fair, C-SPAN’s YouTube clip of Smith’s opening statement had more than 900,000 views by Thursday night, about four times as many as its clip of Schmitt there. However, I think that most people who subscribe to C-SPAN’s YouTube channel (*cough* me *cough*) probably aren’t what you’d call “casual consumers of politics news.”

The flub got a lot of interesting cross-over coverage, too. The Athletic, Front Office Sports, TMZ, The Daily Show and Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue all had stories about Schmitt’s gaffe. As far as I can tell, though, only Kimmel touched on anything that went beyond basketball and Schmitt’s embarrassment.

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It’s hard getting people to care about the minutiae of congressional hearings; maybe moments like this are how journalists can change that

Let’s get this out of the way: these are usually very long and extraordinarily boring. Whether in the House or the Senate, they’re often just a series of politicians trying to do exactly what Schmitt did during that hearing. There’s a big I actually have more of a comment than a question vibe to them. Outgoing (thank god) Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) recently used a hearing featuring Dr. Anthea Hartig, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, to rant about transgender people. This is just the type of thing that happens in these hearings.

Nobody who isn’t paid to watch (or isn’t a sicko like me) is going to sit through all of that, nor should they! But there’s often one or two viral moments that reach people who would never be caught dead actually watching the hearings live. And I think that presents an opportunity for journalists and media organizations to try to use the viral moment as a jumping off point to talk about what else happened and to get people to care about what really matters.

I think this one would have been easy, because Schmitt’s bit helped prove the point that Smith had been trying to make: Trump and his lackeys have been threatening to jail him and others who had investigated Trump for years. Schmitt’s argument was a botched perjury trap. Back in January, Trump accused Smith of “large scale perjury,” and the last senator to question Smith on Tuesday, Josh Hawley (R-MO), told him, “If it were up to me, I’d charge you with perjury, but you should certainly be disbarred.” You could put together a really compelling clip that combines all of this, proving the point.

To his credit, CNN’s Aaron Blake did basically this in his write-up. Yes, he led with Schmitt, but he made an important connection to the larger story: “Republicans have struggled mightily to substantiate Trump’s desire for Smith to be charged criminally. But rarely has it seemed to backfire like it did Tuesday.” The rest of the piece went pretty heavy on what Smith said: that Lindsey Graham was a “likely” witness, his defense of his fired staff, and why he kept the subpoenas secret. Charlie Sykes opened on the flub and then ran a whole section called “What Jack Smith said,” jail line included. Perfect. I’d like to see more stuff like this, and would love to see journalists and influencers come up with additional ideas for harnessing these moments for broader education.

Following the Chicago Bears’ 27-7 win over the Philadelphia Eagles last night, head coach Ben Johnson ended his locker room speech the way he does after wins: by leading the whole team in an intense call-and-response.

I love it. It rules. It gets me pumped up and makes me want to run through a brick wall whenever I see a new version of it. Hell yeah. And sure, I admit that “never let it rest” probably shouldn’t be taken literally by me, a person who spends most of the day in bed and will for at least a few more weeks. But you get the gist.

Anyway, as I’ve been trying to steer clear of politics for a little bit (hey, this newsletter is technically in the “Culture” section, not “Politics,” so I’m giving myself permission to veer a bit outside my regular coverage), I decided that today’s newsletter would be about me, Da Bears, repeatedly hearing that a quarterback who is two years younger than me is basically ancient, and how I can try to piece myself back together.

I’m definitely not “better.” And oh boy, am I not “best.” I’m stuck in bed, mentally and physically wiped, and I’m much less “good” than I was a few weeks ago. I’m trying to hold on to some hope that I’ll get “better.” As for “best?” Let’s not get carried away. One step at a time, okay?

But still, watching the game last night gave me a little bit of a lift.

Some context, if you missed it: on September 14, I had a transition-related surgery. The run-up to and recovery from the surgery have been harder than I’d hoped, and it’s only going as smoothly as it is because my wonderful, perfect wife, Kayla, is being her wonderful, perfect self, taking care of me. You can read more about some of that in my last post (”Trainwreck“). And right now, I’m just trying to avoid another round of what I’ve jokingly called “brain camp.”

At my most recent therapy session, we talked about how politics, trans rights, and self-preservation as it concerns those two things, have essentially become areas of intense hyperfocus for me. I find myself existing in a state of hypervigilance, always on the lookout for the next disaster. It’s unhealthy, and it would be helpful if I could find ways to take my mind off of that for at least a little bit. The goal has been to avoid letting myself get sucked into rabbit holes of terror and instead aim my attention at less consequential, lighter things. Things that aren’t self-destructive. Things I enjoy. Things that make me feel good.

So please indulge me while I tell you a little bit about last night’s Bears game.

It had been exactly two weeks since my surgery. I was propped up in bed, watching the game on the local ABC station with my dogs Tater Tot and Casserole. I didn’t have high hopes for my beloved Bears after superstar quarterback Caleb Williams went down with a hamstring strain during last week’s game. And when it was announced that they’d be going with career backup Case Keenum in his place, I’d already accepted that the Bears were going to get absolutely trounced. The Eagles were undefeated, and the Bears were 3.5-point underdogs. Still, what else was I going to do on a Monday night?

Case Keenum isn’t a particularly great NFL quarterback, which makes all of this so much cooler

At least not in the context of his entire career. But he sure has a lot of heart, and he has a real knack for coming up big in big moments.

The “elderly” Keenum, 38 (still two years younger than me, lol), has been bouncing around the NFL since going undrafted in 2012 out of the University of Houston. For most of his career, he’s been a perfectly serviceable, average journeyman quarterback. But he’s also the guy who threw the Minneapolis Miracle. Playing for the Vikings during a 2018 playoff game, down by a point to the Saints with 10 seconds left, Keenum connected with Stefon Diggs for a game-winning 61-yard touchdown, propelling the Vikings to victory as time ran out.

In the spring of 2025, Keenum was fresh off of a knee surgery and ready to retire when newly hired Bears coach Ben Johnson called up the veteran quarterback and asked him to sign on to help mentor Caleb Williams, the number one pick in the 2024 draft. When it comes to third-string quarterbacks, the odds of ever actually getting a chance to play are pretty slim. He wasn’t there to lead the team down the field, but to act as a sort of player-coach to Williams. This piece at The Athletic about all of this is a great read filled with wholesome anecdotes about the relationship between Keenum, Williams, and Johnson.

But with Williams out for a few weeks with an injury and second-string QB Tyson Bagent spending most of the week out of practice in the concussion protocol, Keenum was called upon to prove he still had it in him. And oh wow, did he ever. He connected on 24 of 34 passes for 247 yards and two touchdowns. He also scored a rushing touchdown from the 1-yard line, his first in seven years. It was awesome. Please check out these highlights. Please check out his pre- and post-game interviews. It’s great stuff. I love it.

For the first time ever, his kids got to watch him play in person. It’s just so cool that he got the chance to ball out in front of his family like that. And if this is his last ever NFL start (it’s not yet clear whether he’ll start next week or if Johnson will go with Bagent until Williams is healthy), it’s about as perfect an end to his career as he could have possibly hoped for, doing it all in front of a national audience on Monday Night Football. It was a feel-good moment, and it’s the exact kind of thing that makes me love sports. I love that for him.

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Happiness?

The other day, I was having a conversation with someone who asked me what makes me happy. And I was (and remain) a bit stumped by the question, because I really, truly don’t know. There are a lot of things that I like. I like watching movies. I like watching sports. I like playing video games. I like listening to music. I (sometimes) like writing. But am I actually happy? That’s a tough one. Happiness just isn’t an emotion I’m super familiar with, and it hasn’t been for a long time.

So it was kind of nice to just chill out in bed and do something normal like watching a football game. I even caught myself smiling a few times during the evening, watching Keenum tear it up on the field. Importantly, I wasn’t consumed by negative thoughts — fear, anxiety, sadness, etc. (Sports does this for me every once in a while.1) I may be grading a bit on a curve, but I’ll take it.

After the game, Keenum said to reporters that he spent the week putting in 14- to 16-hour days to put himself in the best possible position to make the most of what could be his final opportunity to play meaningful football. “Barely saw the wife and kids,” he said. “Studied film. Grinding. I had my phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ for all my friends.” Only his wife and Johnson could call or text him during the week. “I’ll let you guess who called more,” he said.

And that’s kind of how I feel right now. I’ve got to lock in on the things that are important to me. I need to put myself in the best possible position to avoid complications with my surgical recovery and to piece together my fractured mental health. So that’s why you probably won’t be seeing much of me on social media for the foreseeable future. At least not on X or Bluesky, which is where I feel I’ve struggled to hold myself together the most. Both accounts still exist, but they’re parked (X is set to private again), and I’m logged out of both on my phone and my laptop. I may be a bit less accessible than I have been in the past, but I’m sure you can find me if you need me.

Good. Better. Best.

Ten days ago, I had a transition-related surgery (or “gender-affirming surgery,” if that’s more your lingo). It’s not my first, but it’s probably the biggest one I’ve had. And hopefully, it’s the final one I’ll need. (Things seem to be fine.) I didn’t actually plan on publicly talking about it at all, because over the course of the past several years, I’ve gotten a lot more self-conscious about publicly sharing milestones related to my transition, which began back in 2012, a simpler time when every single person on the planet didn’t seem to have an opinion on trans people, if we should exist, or how we should be allowed to participate in society. I started sharing a lot less about my personal life over the years (even selfies are pretty rare on my social media accounts these days).

But I don’t think it’s really possible to explain my (more than a week-long) absence from TPA and some personal failings I’ll open up about without talking about the surgery to some extent. So, bear with me.

If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed that I’ve been picking fights with anyone and everyone on the internet. Friends. Acquaintances. Professional colleagues. Complete strangers. I’ve always had a really short fuse, but the past few weeks have really taken it to a new and embarrassing level. I was telling people to “fuck off into the sun” over a mild disagreement with the frequency a normal person would say, “Good morning!” This is… very bad. There is shame, embarrassment, guilt, and a whole lot of personal apologies to be doled out in the near future. In most cases, I will not deserve, nor will I likely find acceptance for said apologies.

Several weeks ago, to prepare for the aforementioned surgery, I had to go off of my estrogen (I was only able to restart it on Monday of this week). And just... however obnoxious, rude, and self-absorbed I usually am, I’m just a whole, whole lot more unregulated when I’m not on my hormones. And at first, it didn’t even fully register with me that I was being extra hair-trigger-y and irrational. And even once I did, I couldn’t find the will to stop being mean to people who didn’t deserve the type of response I was giving them. It’s not an excuse. Just context.

I know my worst impulses well enough that, before the surgery, I bought a product called Brick (a little NFC tag that locks you out of certain apps — I set it to keep me out of X, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky — until you tap your phone against it again) so I wouldn’t do anything stupid while I was in the hospital for a few days immediately following the surgery. However, when I was discharged from the hospital, I thought I was more stable than I was.

This is not me saying, “I wasn’t on my hormones! Wah! It’s not my fault!” This is me saying that I really want to talk about all of this, but I need to actually physically recover from this surgery before I can do that to the extent that I want to.

And I don’t want this to be some sort of, “I won’t flip out on someone for saying something I disagree with again” post, because that’s the problem: as much as I’ve tried, I can’t seem to actually keep those promises. So I’m going to hold off on making more of them until I’m confident I can make good. I am trying, and I will keep trying until I can.

But for years now, I’ve been acutely aware that social media and direct text communication is where I’m at my absolute worst. I just don’t think I can do text-based social media anymore (a conclusion I’ve reached a number of times in the past, but haven’t followed through on my planned actions of, you know, no longer using these social media platforms, no longer DMing people irritated or angry rants. I’m going to try it again, and I’ve already locked down my Twitter and Bluesky accounts. I really hope I can resist the Sirens’ call back to the apps that functioned as the primary way I communicated with people all the way back to MySpace. It’s not going to be enough to just say, “Okay, I’m done using social media anymore,” because I’ve tried that and failed. I’m working to figure out a true plan of action, and I just don’t quite know what that’s going to look like yet. So I’ll be addressing that in the near future, as well. It took me several times to quit smoking, and weirdly, stupidly, this has been harder for me.

I know I can communicate without blowing up at people online because I do it in every article I write. The words are deliberate. The tone is deliberate. But there’s something about microblogging and direct text communication that I just haven’t been able to make work no matter how much I’ve tried over the past 15 years or so.

So, stay tuned for more on all of that. When I know what I’m going to do, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, hang tight. Today’s piece, below, is somewhat related. - PM

Strangely, I can relate

On Tuesday, the Boston Globe Magazine published a story by Annalisa Quinn about Last Ditch, a struggling lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. A defining feature of the bar was that it required patrons to wear KN95 masks. And at the end of last month, it announced that while masks would remain mandatory for the rest of the week, Saturday nights would be mask-optional, a decision born out of financial necessity in hopes of saving the bar. It was a literal last-ditch effort to save Last Ditch.

The story went super-mega-viral (not unlike the viruses its patrons were trying to avoid). And it’s not that readers were just super interested in a story about the financial struggles of lesbian bar in a small town in Massachusetts, but because it gave them something to gawk at.

People got a lot of laughs out of the story, because it was kind of a collection of what “normies” would think of as a perfect storm of “woke” excesses. Where to start?

You’ve got a bar that requires its patrons to wear masks. A lot of people laugh at the very idea of a mask mandate in September 2026, nearly seven years into the pandemic (coincidentally, one of the blow-ups I had via text with a professional colleague days earlier was about mask mandates and whether or not the COVID-19 pandemic was actually over). There’s a drag performer, one of the bar’s co-founders, who uses it/its pronouns. There’s a he/him lesbian (I know this is confusing, but really, truly, this is not a concept that anyone outside the queer community should concern themselves with, really, it’s fine). There’s the fact that even the bar’s apology for the tone of its announcement got attacked because the image it posted to Instagram didn’t have alt text. (That’s what screen readers use to describe images for visually impaired people. Alt text is good! Use alt text when it’s an option and you’re able to!) There’s the fact that one of the founders left to enroll in clown school.

And then there’s the backlash, which goes way beyond what anyone would consider reasonable. Here’s one of the comments on the original post:

“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic].”

On September 11, the bar held its monthly community meeting, with a licensed therapist on hand to serve as a mediator for what looked to be a pretty tense situation. Some of the attendees were there in person. Some attended virtually over Zoom.

The therapist told the people joining over Zoom that she loved having them there, but that “these platforms alienate us from each other. I’m talking about social media.” She asked whether everyone could try to step out of “places of righteousness,” and said she’d love to get to a place “where we all know each other’s face, where we all know each other’s name.”

That did not go over well with the online attendees.

“It’s messed up that the mediator is dismissing those attending virtually. That’s not accessibility,” someone wrote in the chat. Another said, “A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgment of harm and I’m hearing a WHITE therapist ... center[ing] the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff.” At one point, attendees claimed that as therapists are mandated reporters, that basically made the therapist the same thing as a cop who could have them hospitalized against their will. Her mere presence was “wildly unsafe.”

And man, that’s just... a lot going on. You’ve got some righteous grandstanding, some paranoia, identities being used as cudgels. And through it all, a demand for something like accountability or punishment.

26-year-old Jackie Matellian, the last of the bar’s three founders still running it, cried when it was her turn to speak. See, Last Ditch wasn’t actually her “passion project,” so much as it was her two other co-founders’. “I never really wanted to do this,” she told the room. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.” She was there, still trying to make things work because she was on the hook for the $50,000 loan that the founders took out to launch the bar in the first place. Apparently, she’s been living in her truck for six months and working four different jobs to try to make it all work. It had broken her. She was financially ruined, she was emotionally ruined, and she was just trying to do the best she could to keep from things getting even worse.

The chat was not moved by any of that. One attendee said, “[Y]ou chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”

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It’s just... well, it’s a trainwreck. The whole thing is a trainwreck. And oh boy, do people like to watch trainwrecks. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, a note to Globe staff said the story brought in 1,000 subscribers in a single day. The paper’s managing editor called it “by far our best performing story of the year,” and said that it was “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records.”

That’s wild. This is the same paper, founded in 1872, that published the 2002 investigative series about sex abuse in the Catholic Church that inspired the movie Spotlight! And now, a story about a failing lesbian bar in a small town in Massachusetts was going to be the paper’s crown jewel of 2026.

National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry asked his colleagues to name their favorite lines from the story. (He went with the clown school quote, for what it’s worth.) And honestly, I cannot blame the public for gawking at this disaster.

Sadly, all of this is almost certainly going to end with the bar closing sometime in the very near future, and its owner will be something nearing destitute. Far from the laugh riot it’s been made out to be, it’s just really, really sad. The bar probably never had a chance. Masks, no masks, it’s really difficult to run a lesbian bar in the 2020s. It was doomed from the start, and the whole thing is heartbreaking. For the bar, for its patrons, for its owner, and for the local queer community.

And when you look at it, especially from afar, it’s clear that the amount of rage and vitriol directed at a bar owner who was just trying her best to keep her business afloat was not rational. It’s not fair.

Saying you hope a bar gets firebombed is crazy! I’m sure the person who wrote it felt righteous. And that’s... kind of the thing here... it’s really, really easy to sit behind a screen and say some of the most unhinged, anger-fueled things you can imagine. It’s so easy. There’s a word for it: keyboard warrior. I’m pretty sure whoever wrote that comment wouldn’t have said it to Matellian’s face.

And that’s where I’m at

That’s where I can relate to the story. That’s a big part of my problem. I’ve been the “firebomb” person! Sometimes I am (not literally in this case) the “firebomb” person! Sometime about a decade or so ago, I once infamously yelled at via direct message on Twitter a whole host of horrible things (”Die in a fire! Drink bleach!” and some stuff that I can’t even print here because of a disagreement over whether or not journalists deserved to be paid for their work). And try as I might, truly, truly, I can’t keep myself from losing my cool on the internet. Pretty much every controversy I’ve gotten myself into on the internet over the past 15 years or so happened because it’s just so easy to type things you would never, ever say to someone’s face. Or even over the phone. One of my recent blow-ups actually started with the other person suggesting we have the conversation over the phone. And you know what? Had I taken them up on that offer, I’m sure it would have been a fine conversation! We might not have agreed, but it would have been normal, and not the antisocial disaster of insult-slinging via text that it ended up being.

See, god, this is embarrassing to admit, but I’ve always hated talking on the phone. For one, I’m a lot quicker at putting words together when I can see them in writing on a screen. But mostly, it’s always been a source of anxiety for me. When I was a kid, I’d pick up the phone, say hello, and hear one of my mom’s friends say, “Hey, Sue!” (Sue is my mom.) My voice wasn’t particularly masculine. For a while before I came out as trans, I worked in a call center, and I got a lot of “I was just talking to the young lady” when a caller who’d been disconnected from me moments earlier called back and got someone else, so I started trying to purposely pitch my voice down a bit. Then I came out, and I became extremely self-conscious about my voice all over again, this time thinking that it “clocked” me as trans, because I thought it was too masculine and because of the years of affectations I’d been applying. (Think the way Elizabeth Holmes used to speak publicly.)

And lol, the truth is that my voice has always just been a bit feminine for a man, masculine for a woman, but in reality, I’m the only one hung up on it. No one else really cares, I’m sure. Additionally, I live a pretty physically isolated life.

Not long ago, I’d been beefing with someone on Twitter about an organization he worked for and trans issues. At one point, he was like, “Parker, I’m going to block you.” (And I’d have definitely deserved it.) I offered a video chat instead, and he said yes. We ended up talking for about half an hour and actually had a productive conversation. It was a good experience! I still don’t agree with him on the stuff we disagreed about, but I felt like I understood his position better, and I could feel a lot less rage. Unfortunately, that was in the middle of me still having a lot of BIG feelings in texts and DMs and group chats, the ones I wrote about at the top of this post.

I need to get tf over myself and learn to pick up the phone. Because if I don’t, if I try to keyboard-warrior my way through it by text or tweet or even email, I’m going to keep getting worse. I’m going to keep alienating what friends I have left. I’m going to keep making enemies. I’m going to keep being the worst version of myself possible. I hate that version of myself.

I’m going to get into all of this in more detail, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, if I had to guess? I just need to not be writing this from my phone while in my bed.

Twenty-one times between October 20 and November 7, 2018, President Donald Trump publicly promised that a 10 percent tax cut for the middle class was on its way. He promised the tax cut before the midterms, despite the fact that Congress had already adjourned and couldn’t even pass a bill doing that before the midterms if they wanted to.

On October 31, six days out from the elections, the White House put out a joint statement with the House Ways and Means Republicans promising to take up the tax cut bill (which didn’t yet exist) “at the start of the 116th Congress.”

But see, the 116th Congress hadn’t even been elected yet, meaning… you guessed it… people needed to vote for Republicans if they wanted the 10% tax cut Trump promised.

Then he got a bit more explicit. Two days before the election, on November 4, a reporter asked Trump about the status of the tax cut. His answer was… interesting. He said that the White House had been working with House Republicans, but he added an escape hatch: “Now, it could be that if we lose control of the House, that’s not going to happen.”

There it is.

The morning after Democrats retook the House, a reporter asked Trump about the status of the tax cut. He danced around it. Sixteen days later, he spoke at a rally in Houston where he said that the bill for the tax cuts was going to be introduced next week.

But that’s the last anyone heard of it. He stopped talking about it. There was never any bill. Nothing introduced before the election, nothing introduced during the lame duck session when Republicans still controlled Congress, and not in a year-end tax package written by Republicans weeks later. It was gone. I did some research on this and looked for any possible mention of this after that date, but I came up empty. I searched the American Presidency Project’s archive of Trump’s public comments for the phrase “10 percent tax cut,” between November 8, 2018 and January 20, 2021 — every rally, gaggle, interview, signing statement, and there was just… nothing. I’d hoped to find a specific moment where he dropped it, where he walked it back, or even where he said he was still working on it. But there was nothing. It was gone. It was a ruse to try to incentivize people to vote for Republicans.

That brings us to last Wednesday night in Dallas. About midway through Trump’s two-hour speech at the Republican midterm convention, Trump did it again:

“Here is my promise: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000, very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

And again:

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend.”

This was a complete rehash of Trump 2018 midterm strategy of bribing voters.

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There is no “Trump Dividend,” and nobody even knows where the money could come from

There’s no bill. There’s no Congressional Budget Office cost estimate. You can’t score a bill that doesn’t exist. When you see people point to the cost as being something in the ballpark of $1.2 trillion, that’s mostly just people in newsrooms multiplying the Census Bureau’s estimate of adult citizens by five thousand. But again, and this is really important to understand: it’s not real, and Trump is just dangling this in front of voters.

On Laura Ingraham’s show, Trump said that the cost of the checks would come from tariffs. Elsewhere, he said they’d be paid for by “growth.” On Truth Social, he said they’d be paid for by “Trillions of Dollars of Economic Development, Investment, and Pure SUCCESS.” JD Vance also went on Fox within the hour of the speech and said tariffs, and also that the checks would be for “the American middle class” rather than, as Trump had just said onstage, every adult citizen in the country.

It’s a con, guys.

He’s been telling people a check is coming since February 2025

The $5,000 is at least the fourth time he’s done something like this.

Remember the “DOGE dividend” from back in February of last year? That was also a promise to send everyone $5,000. That never materialized.

Then, on November 9, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social that “a divident of at least $2,000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

Second was the tariff dividend. On November 9, Trump posted on Truth Social that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.” A week later, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that these checks would go out “somewhere prior to, you know, probably the middle of next year,” meaning 2026. Well, the “middle of next year” came and went, and no checks had been sent out. Nobody got $2,000. Of course.

And then there was Trump’s plan for health care. In announcing in January his “Great Healthcare Plan,” Trump said, “The government is going to pay the money directly to you. It goes to you, and then you take the money and buy your own healthcare… the big insurance companies lose and the people of our country win.” Well, needless to say, the Great Healthcare Plan never materialized, and no money was sent “directly to you.”

Oh! And in addition to all of that, in addition to Trump’s latest “$5,000” promise, he’s also been talking about sending $500 ACA rebate checks to as many as a million people in 30 states before November 3rd. Sure, man. Sure.

This is all a scam to try to get people to vote for him. Especially these latest promises of checks.

Every check that ever showed up went through Congress

Yes, there have been checks sent out to people during Trump’s presidencies. Remember the CARES Act from during COVID? The government sent out 161 million payments that totalled more than $271 billion in 2020. You may recall that he insisted on his name appearing on the checks to people would think that this was directly from him and not an act of Congress. A second round of those checks went out in December 2020.

Anyway, I guess my point here is just, you know, don’t get scammed by Trump the scammer.

“For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I want to just thank my people; I took a lot of my me(n) — I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation — everybody went down with me. We went down, it was a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest — it was, you know, it was raw, and nobody’s seen anything like it, ever.

We had other buildings; the United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down; the truth is it creaked a lot, it creaked. It still creaks. But it never came down, and I re(member) — I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen — big, strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘Gotta get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down; it didn’t come down. US Steel.”

One Liberty Plaza — formerly known as the U.S. Steel Building — is located at 165 Broadway, across from the site of where the Twin Towers once stood. It reopened about a month and a half after the attack, after its owner Brookfield Properties announced that a preliminary review by independent structural engineers had found no damage to the building’s structure. Aside from some damage to the building’s facade (they replaced hundreds of windows on the west side of the building), it was completely fine. Trump’s claim that “it still creaks” is odd, as people have been going to work in the building every weekday for the past 25 years without incident.

CNN’s Daniel Dale fact checked Trump’s claim, finding there to be “no basis“ for it. No, Trump wasn’t close to the World Trade Center on the day of the attack. No, there’s no evidence that Trump was in the U.S. Steel Building in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, either. While there was some initial worry that the U.S. Steel Building might have structural damage in the days after the attacks, there’s no evidence that Trump was there.

He’s been building on this story for a quarter century

On September 13, 2001, in an interview with NBC, Trump shared the first iteration of the tale:

“Well, not only is it devastation, but it’s very dangerous. Because every few minutes, a whistle will go off and everybody would just run, because you have all the buildings around it, which are in such a weakened state, that people just don’t know.

And so, they just have to take off, and then they come back, and they’re working under 50-story buildings that you don’t know if... if they’re going to fall down. So, it’s a terrible thing for the workers and it’s a terrible thing for the world, really.”

In the interview, Trump says that he has “hundreds of men inside working right now, and we’re bringing down another 125 in a little while.” Asked how his men were holding up, he talked about the rescue effort finding survivors — “like the five firemen that they just found a little while ago” — without ever saying his own crew was the one doing the finding. While Trump has bragged about having men at the scene, there is no evidence that this actually happened.

But what’s interesting about this quote isn’t the lie about him having a crew down there, but the fact that he described the chaos in buildings near ground zero as happening to other people, not him. “Everybody would just run, because you have all the buildings around it, which are in such a weakened state that people just don’t know.” Everybody runs, but he’s not one of them. Later in the same interview, describing the men digging through the rubble: “And above them you have 55-story buildings that are very possibly going to be pouring down on them any minute.” On them.

Then, fourteen years later during a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Trump shared a slightly different version of the story. Now he was a part of it.

“And I was there when we actually thought the U.S. Steel Building was coming down and I’ll never forget that I was standing next to these two massive wonderful firemen and we heard a screech, like a screech, steel on steel and it was a couple of days after the buildings and I was down there with the — we had a crew of people that, you know, to help.

I mean it’s — they needed a lot of help. I’ve never seen anything like I saw, and they heard a screech, and everybody thought that the U.S. Steel Building was coming down and it was not so far from us. And these two guys there were massive guys, two really big — because I’m a big guy and they grabbed me. I must tell you honestly, I never knew I could run that fast. I — but they were running just as fast and they had my arms and they were and we were just running.”

It’s evolved. He’s now at the scene with his crew, and here’s the first appearance of the two firemen. But look at what he says they actually did. They grabbed his arms, and he ran — so fast that he surprised himself. He also gives you a date, “a couple of days after the buildings,” and a location: “not so far from us.” He’s outside the building.

Five years after that, on Newsmax, the story changes again.

“I was down there right after the event, and I brought a big crew of people down. And I helped. A lot of other people helped. Those first responders are very brave. And I’m telling you, we were hearing creaks — I’ve never forgotten it. There was, I think, the United States Steel Building, it was called at the time, and it’s 50 stories tall. And we heard creaks. I said, ‘that building is going to come down,’ and two big firemen grabbed me, grabbed other people. It never came down, but I never heard a noise like that. It was a scary situation.”

Okay. Sure. But then, by Tuesday, the qualifiers were gone. No date. No “not so far from us.” Nobody else getting grabbed. And Trump wasn’t running anymore — he was being carried.

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He can’t stop lying about 9/11

Hours after the towers fell on 9/11, Trump called in to WWOR-TV. Someone asked him about the condition of one of his buildings, 40 Wall Street. He said this:

“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest — and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

Now, this might seem like a really callous thing to brag about on 9/11, but what makes it even more bizarre is the fact that 40 Wall Street was not actually the tallest building in lower Manhattan. 70 Pine was still 25 feet taller than 40 Wall Street. And while that seems like a trivial thing to take issue with, I think it’s indicative of Trump’s tendency to make things up.

In November 2015, Trump said during a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, that he personally witnessed people jump out of the towers on 9/11, watching from his apartment:

“Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view — a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center. And I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit ... I saw the second plane hit the building and I said, ‘Wow that’s unbelievable.’”

Two days earlier, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump told the audience that he “watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” He doubled down on the line during an interview with ABC News’ This Week. There is no evidence that there were “thousands and thousands of people” cheering the 9/11 attacks.

In Buffalo in April 2016, Trump publicly claimed that he was personally at ground zero clearing rubble (this is the same speech where he accidentally referred to it as 7-Eleven instead of 9/11):

“These people were going through terror and you know what happened. Everyone who helped clear the rubble. And I was there and I watched and I helped a little bit. But I want to tell you, those people were amazing. Clearing the rubble, trying to find additional lives. You didn’t know what was gonna come down on all of us and they handled it. Every small act of kindness, every great act of courage, those are New York values, OK? So when a guy like lying Ted Cruz talks about, talks about New York values folks, those are the values that we want to talk about.”

On July 29, 2019, during an event permanently authorizing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, speaking to a crowd of first responders, Trump made sure to say that while he doesn’t consider himself a first responder, he was totally there.

“In a few moments, I will sign the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. This law makes permanent the financial support for families who lost precious loved ones as a result of September 11th attacks. It also provides pensions for those who are suffering from cancer and other illnesses stemming from the toxic debris they were exposed to in the aftermath of the attacks. Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

The next day, Richard Alles, who was an FDNY battalion chief on September 11 and spent months on the site in its aftermath, spoke with PolitiFact, telling them, “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.” And if Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, “there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services. Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.” Alles, who is now director of 9/11 community affairs at the law firm Barasch and McGarry, which represents people filing Victim Compensation Fund claims, also told PolitiFact that Trump’s line about being at ground zero was not on the Teleprompter.

While speaking at the Pentagon on the 18th anniversary of 9/11, Trump said:

“I was sitting at home watching a major business television show early that morning. Jack Welch, the legendary head of General Electric, was about to be interviewed when all of the sudden they cut away. At first there were different reports. ‘It was a boiler fire.’ But I knew that boilers aren’t at the top of a building. ‘It was a kitchen explosion in Windows of the World.’ Nobody really knew what happened. There was great confusion.

I was looking out from a building in midtown Manhattan directly at the World Trade Center when I saw a second plane, at a tremendous speed, go into the second tower.

Soon after, I went down to ground zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could. We were not alone. So many others were scattered around trying to do the same, they were all trying to help.”

Trump Tower is more than 4 miles away from ground zero. He almost certainly could not see people jumping from the towers with the naked eye. It’s possible he’s confusing this with TV coverage he watched.

And then just this past Sunday, Trump appeared on Fox News:

“I had an apartment where I’m viewing the World Trade Center from midtown. I was downtown, but it’s not very far when the building is 115 stories tall. And I’m viewing this thing happen, and I’m saying, ‘That’s crazy. Couldn’t be a plane. Maybe it was a missile.’

And then I saw the second plane hit, and you saw that coming, and you’re watching it and it’s — because I watched the air patterns for years, and you know where the planes are, they go right up the Hudson River. This thing was coming right into the second building. And I said, ‘Wow!’ So I watched that happen, and I said ‘Wow, we are now in a different time.’ So I saw it and I said ‘The world has just changed.’ And I went down. I was building a building in New York and I had a lot of construction workers, and I went shortly after, the following day. You couldn’t go down the same day. But, like the following day. Very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard.”

That’s a lot of bullshit from just one guy.

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Now, you may be asking what El-Sayed, who was a high schooler at the time, has to do with 9/11. Here’s what the article gives us:

1. In an April 2020 tweet, El-Sayed “compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation’s post-9/11 mobilization.”

2. Another COVID-related tweet: “El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped ‘that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.’”

3. In a tweet posted on September 11, 2021, marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, El-Sayed wrote, “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, and…?” Those are all perfectly reasonable statements. Yes, the fact that the U.S. was experiencing the equivalent of multiple 9/11s per week at certain points in the pandemic was pretty widely acknowledged. And hey, maybe it would have been nice if we’d have responded to pandemic deaths with the same urgency as we did the 9/11 attacks (but by addressing global health vs. starting what became not-so-lovingly referred to as “forever wars”). And the other comment there acknowledged the devastation of both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the decades of destruction the U.S. waged on the Middle East in response. There’s absolutely nothing offensive or dismissive about acknowledging that, and the fact that this is at all controversial goes to show just how we’ve really failed as a country to learn any lessons from our disastrous start to the century.

The article was tagged “First on CBS,” but the piece pulls pretty heavily from a December 2025 article from the right-wing Washington Free Beacon, which tried (and failed) to whip up a scandal over the “Today, I mourn…” tweet.

Naturally, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a press release with the CBS News story, celebrating it.

By early afternoon, CBS had tweaked the headline to focus specifically on the tweets (”Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks”), but the story had already served its purpose of trying to make it sound as though El-Sayed, who is Muslim, was at best ambivalent about the 9/11 attacks.

Everyone made the same comparison in 2020, including CBS News

On April 1, 2020, three weeks before El-Sayed’s tweet that “argued for a response commensurate with the nation’s post-9/11 mobilization,” CBS News political reporter Grace Segers published a story about Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS)’s call to create a bipartisan commission to look into the government response, modeled after the 9/11 commission.

“More Americans have now died from COVID-19 than were killed in the 9/11 attacks,” reads the second sentence of the story. Oh wow! How offensive to note this reality, I guess?

And it’s an obvious comparison to make. On Fox News, Neil Cavuto made it, saying “Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11.” Trump’s hand-picked Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that the COVID pandemic “is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment,” adding, “Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.” In May 2020, Donald Trump himself said that the virus was “worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center.”

I don’t think there were many people who looked at those statements and went after Cavuto, Adams, or Trump for supposedly not showing enough respect for the lives lost on 9/11 or anything like that. Why? Well, for one, because these aren’t disrespectful things to say! Just as there was nothing disrespectful in El-Sayed’s tweets.

The truth is that COVID was a big deal. I get that it’s currently in fashion to pretend that, if anything, we took it too seriously, but it’s just not true. Nearly a million Americans died from COVID in the first two years of the pandemic; the total is now more than 1.2 million. It was the deadliest pandemic in American history. At the very worst of it, more than 4,000 Americans died from COVID in a single day, surpassing the 9/11 death toll of 2,977 victims. We did not mobilize. We did not rebuild. We did not do the work to make sure the next pandemic would hurt us less. Yes, Operation Warp Speed helped get us a vaccine, but it was then undermined by Trump and Fox News once Biden won the 2020 election. We argued about masks. We complained about “lockdowns.” And then we mostly stopped talking about COVID at all. Now, if it comes up, it’s usually in the context of someone arguing we did too much during the pandemic, or rehashing the virus’ origins.

COVID was a global tragedy, yes; it was also a national tragedy. And if it was a national tragedy when three thousand Americans died on 9/11 — and it was — you really don’t get to shrug at the fact that 1.2 million people died from a pandemic that could have been much better handled.

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“Tomorrow, I’ll mourn”

The other deleted post, the one the Free Beacon dug up in December, was posted by El-Sayed on September 11, 2021:

Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith.

Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.

Again, I do not understand the objection here. Here he was, lamenting actions that were taken in his faith (Islam) and his country (the U.S.). The objection people seemed to have is basically that whatever you make of the sentiment, you don’t say it on 9/11. But 1.) that’s a pretty arbitrary rule that doesn’t actually make a ton of sense, and 2.) he specifically said that “today” was for mourning the victims of the terrorist attacks and “tomorrow” was for mourning everyone else.

It’s not in any way disrespectful to reflect on the serious mistakes the U.S. made after 9/11. The government used the attacks to justify attacking our civil liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq (a country that truly had nothing to do with 9/11). Our actions in the Middle East contributed in a huge way to the rise of ISIS. It’s not offensive to care about what was lost in the wake of that awful day.

And it’s not like El-Sayed made up that “million” number, either. Ten days before El-Sayed’s tweet, Brown University’s Costs of War project published an updated breakdown of the financial and human costs of the post-9/11 wars. Their estimates: more than 900,000 deaths and $8 trillion.

This is such a normal thing to note that the day before El-Sayed’s post, Audie Cornish on an episode of NPR’s All Things Considered referenced the Brown numbers:

Seven thousand U.S. service members is just a fraction of the human cost of America’s post-9/11 wars. There are also national and military police in other countries, opposition fighters, allied troops, civilians, contractors, humanitarian workers, journalists. Altogether, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates around 900,000 people have died in major war zones since 9/11. Now, one figure not included in that count - suicides among American active duty personnel and veterans of those conflicts. By one estimate, since 9/11, more than 30,000 have died by suicide. And that’s more than four times as many than have died in military operations.

Similarly, a couple of years later, 11 days after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, then-President Joe Biden traveled to Tel Aviv. There, he offered condolences, promises of U.S. support, but also a word of caution:

But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.

After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.

I’m the first U.S. president to visit Israel in time of war.

I’ve made wartime decisions. I know the choices are never clear or easy for the leadership. There’s always costs.

But it requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.

The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.

Worth noting what Biden said a few lines earlier in that same speech: “we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s.”

That same day, Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an article in the New York Review of Books urging Israel to avoid making the same “fearful and vengeful” mistakes the U.S. did after 9/11.

The immediate comparisons to the September 11 attacks felt apt to me not only because of the shock of violence on such a scale but also because of the emotional response that followed. I remember standing on the Brooklyn waterfront that day and watching as the first tower crumbled to the ground. As a twenty-three-year-old American who had to that point been insulated from the wider world, I found myself longing for vengeance as a path to security. I felt a sense of clarity about good and evil that made it difficult to scrutinize the actions that my own government soon began to take. I felt anger toward people who even flirted with discussing the political context of the attacks, whether it was American support in the 1980s for the mujahideen who evolved into the Taliban or our partnership with an oil-rich and autocratic Saudi Arabia—the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and most of the hijackers, and an incubator of the extremist ideologies they embraced.

Human beings react unconsciously in the face of threats, rarely stopping to consider the potential consequences before we respond to violence with greater violence. This is particularly true when you are the stronger party—as the US was relative to al-Qaeda and the Taliban after September 11, and as Israelis are now relative to Hamas. What was the result of America’s response to a traumatizing terrorist attack? Yes, the “Global War on Terrorism” launched under President George W. Bush and refined under President Obama disrupted terrorist networks and destroyed the version of al-Qaeda that attacked us; in the past two decades, the US has not faced an attack at home anywhere near the scale of September 11.

But imagine if you were told on September 12, 2001, about the unintended consequences of our fearful and vengeful reaction. That we would launch an illogical war in Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of people, fuel sectarian hatred in the Middle East, empower Iran, and discredit American leadership and democracy itself. That we would find ourselves facing an ever-shifting threat from new iterations of al-Qaeda and from groups, like ISIS, that on September 11 did not yet exist. That we would squander our moment of global predominance fighting a war on terror rather than focusing on the climate’s tipping point, a revanchist Russia under Vladimir Putin, or the destabilizing effects of rampant inequality and unregulated technologies. That our commitment to global norms and international law would be cast aside in ways that would be expropriated by all manner of autocrats who claimed that they, too, were fighting terror. That a war in Afghanistan, which seemed so justified at the outset, would end in the chaotic evacuation of desperate Afghans, including women and girls who believed the story we told them about securing their future.

This accounting does not begin to encompass the effects of America’s renewed militarized nationalism, jingoism, and xenophobia on our own society after September 11, which ultimately turned inward. While it is far from the only factor, the US response to September 11 bears a large share of the blame for the dismal and divisive state of our politics, and the collapse of Americans’ confidence in our own institutions and one another. If someone painted that picture for you on September 12, wouldn’t you have thought twice about what we were about to do?

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You know, normal president stuff.

Minutes earlier, Trump had posted an all-caps screed claiming that the FCC was going to do something about “the fake polls used by our crooked media.”

I’m already exhausted. And not that it really matters, but let’s look at what Welker actually said. It wasn’t actually part of the Meet the Press broadcast on Sunday, but during a promo for the show on WRC-TV, the NBC-owned station in DC. Welker said this:

He’s going to loom large over these midterms. There’s no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results, but most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle, so now she takes on Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina.

Three words set him off: “Some mixed results.” Okay, then. And while I’m wary of even dignifying Trump’s nonsense complaint as worth engaging with, I’d like to note that it’s probably fair to say that there have been “mixed results” when it comes to Trump’s primary endorsements. Like… yes, he has successfully endorsed the winning candidate 96% of the time during the 2026 primaries because he made 313 primary picks, which included a bunch of incumbents who didn’t have a serious primary challenger.

His misses have been pretty rough. Trump’s fourteen misses include the endorsement of Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) after serious allegations of sexual misconduct and violence arose. Mills lost. Similarly, My Pillow lunatic and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell lost his primary for governor in Minnesota. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), who famously posted that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” earlier this year, lost his primary for re-election. The most embarrassing loss for Trump probably has to be Amir Hassan (R-MI)‘s failed attempt to get the nomination as the Republican candidate in Michigan’s 8th district. Hassan’s opponent Thomas Smith suspended his campaign a few weeks before the primary, but somehow came away victorious over Hassan. Add in that his picks for governor in Iowa and Georgia both face planted, and you can see how this might be described as “some mixed results.”

But none of this matters. None of this justifies Trump’s calls to sic the FCC on NBC because he didn’t like something the host of Meet the Press said or for publishing polls that correctly note that he is just… wildly unpopular right now. Even if Trump had a perfect score when it came to endorsements, it’s beyond inappropriate for him to be using the FCC like a weapon the way he’s done throughout his second term.

I really, truly don’t want to have to be writing about this. It’s an extraordinarily dumb story — the president got upset because a local TV promo included language he didn’t like, and demanded that the power of the federal government be used to crush her — but I feel like I have to write it up, because as people have been saying for the past decade or so, this isn’t normal.

Let’s take the post in pieces. I really want it to sink in how unhinged this all is.

“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?”

Allowed. By him, I suppose.

“Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment. Unfortunately, she is not the only one.”

So who else is on the FCC naughty list for saying things the president doesn’t like?

“In actuality, it is, without question, the strongest Endorsement in the History of Politics. If it were not, I would be the first to admit it.”

Irrelevant, but I do not think he would, in fact, be the first to admit it.

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He’s been doing this the whole time

That question about who else is on the list isn’t rhetorical. Before Trump retook office in January 2025, he was already leading a crackdown on free speech. In December 2024, weeks before he was sworn in, he sued a pollster — Ann Selzer, along with the Des Moines Register — over a poll he didn’t like. And as soon as he took office, he started putting the government to work doing the same.

Just two days into the second Trump administration, FCC chairman Brendan Carr revived three complaints — against ABC, CBS, and NBC — that had been dismissed as “at odds with the First Amendment.”

The CBS complaint was about the editing of the infamous 2024 60 Minutes interview they aired with Kamala Harris. In February 2025, the FCC released the raw transcript and pushed on in its investigation. As it became clear that Skydance was going to acquire the network, the company started taking action to please the administration. 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens resigned in April 2025, telling staff that “I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it.” The next month, CBS News president Wendy McMahon was out, saying only that she and the company “do not agree on the path forward.”

On July 1, 2025, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the 60 Minutes interview. Two weeks later, Stephen Colbert went on the air and called it a “big fat bribe.” Three days after that, CBS canceled The Late Show, a show that had been critical of Trump, with its final episode airing this past May. CBS said the cancellation was “purely a financial decision.” A week after that, the FCC approved Paramount’s merger with Skydance, after the buyer promised to install an ombudsman to field complaints about anti-conservative bias in CBS News coverage and to end the company’s DEI policies.

Notice that the FCC didn’t ever have to actually rule on the complaint in order to get a bunch of concessions for Trump.

In September 2025, Carr went on a right-wing podcast where he threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment the administration didn’t like. From the audio: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Kimmel was briefly taken off the air, but returned days later.

By April 2026, Trump was on Truth Social ranting about Kimmel again, writing that “Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC” over a joke made at Trump’s expense. The very next day, the FCC ordered all eight ABC-owned stations to file for early license renewal in an attempted shakedown. Disney and ABC are at least pushing back on this, however. Two weeks ago, the company sued the FCC over the license renewal demand, calling it a “retaliatory campaign.” A judge hears arguments in October.

Meanwhile, at NBC, Comcast has been under an FCC investigation since February 2025 over the company’s “invidious forms of DEI“ policies that “do not comply with FCC regulations & civil rights laws.” That one’s still up in the air.

In 19 months, the FCC hasn’t revoked a single broadcast license. And it hasn’t ruled against a single station on a “news distortion” complaint. Why? Because with the exception of ABC and Disney, which seemed to grow a spine after the second time they got targeted by the administration, the FCC hasn’t actually had to. They’ve just gotten whatever they’ve wanted. Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat at the FCC, walked through how it works in a May letter to Disney’s CEO, using the ABC complaint as her example:

In late 2024, a politically motivated outside organization filed a complaint with the FCC alleging that ABC violated the FCC’s news distortion policy in its coverage of the presidential campaign, specifically the presidential debate ABC journalists moderated. Agency staff reviewed that complaint and dismissed it in January 2025, finding it contrary to the First Amendment and that it failed to even assert a set of facts that, if true, would violate FCC rules. This FCC revived it anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits and everything to do with politics. It is unclear to what degree this FCC has even seriously pursued that complaint, and I suspect there will be no end in sight for that investigation because the process is the punishment and keeping it open serves that goal.

This isn’t just some fringe-left read of what’s happening, either. Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, criticized Carr for his “easy way or the hard way” comments about Kimmel, saying that the language was “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.” He called the attitude “dangerous as hell.” In July, 13 former FCC officials of both parties — including Mark Fowler and Dennis Patrick, the two men Ronald Reagan put in charge of the agency — asked the commission to drop the ABC investigation, calling it “an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process.”

This is not normal. I guess it’s worth saying again.

“I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have and if you’re a minor, it’s between you and your doctor and your parents,” he said. “You want to put government inside a clinic or a hospital selectively.”

That’s the answer, and it’s a good one, too. It’s consistent with principles championed by Democrats and Republicans alike (though often at different times for different reasons) that the government shouldn’t interfere in people’s health care decisions. Hell, you could even frame this as a “parental rights” argument, something Republicans really like to bring up whenever it suits them. But in any case, the answer El-Sayed gave to Watters pretty closely mirrors what he has written on his campaign website: “Healthcare decisions should be made by a patient (and their parents if they are a minor) and their doctor–no one else.”

This is a perfectly normal position, and I think it’s the exact one that Democrats who are unsure how to respond to these questions should copy. It’s simple, it’s defensible, and it forces people to understand that the reality of what Republicans are trying to do is to make medical decisions for other people and their children.

Still, Fox was going to try to frame the answer as outrageous. Naturally.

By the next night, over a chyron that read “DEMOCRATS EMBARRASS THEMSELVES,” Sean Hannity said, “One of the issues that seems to bring almost all Democrats together is a dangerous obsession with trans kids.” On screen: images of El-Sayed, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

And sure, I get that’s the message that Fox wants (nay, needs) the public to believe. They need any opposition to GOP bills targeting trans people with new restrictions on how we’re able to live our lives and participate in society to be seen as them having a “dangerous obsession with trans kids.”

The “dangerous obsession” is a Democrat saying the government doesn’t belong in the exam room? Really? It’s not the people trying to place new restrictions on trans people?

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The Watters interview did take some odd turns

In response to El-Sayed’s answer to a question that was basically about whether or not he’d join in with GOP efforts to place new restrictions on health care, Watters blurted out, “So you think it’s okay for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”

*groan*

I get that this makes for a fun talking point to try to make people who oppose new restrictions on health care seem like weird freaks, but it’s just not an accurate reflection of what this debate is about. We know that it’s extraordinarily rare for trans teens to have any sort of transition-related surgery before they turn 18. Like, yeah, maybe you’ll find the stray story of some trans girl who had a vaginoplasty when she was 17.5 because she wanted to be able to have a fresh start at college or whatever, but this image of “slashing a kid’s ding-a-ling off” just doesn’t hold up.

El-Sayed tried to flip this on Watters, asking the Fox News host if he was circumcised.

Watters said he was. “Then you probably want to move on,” said El-Sayed.

“Yeah, but, I mean, that’s a personal question, doctor.”

Yes! It is.

“Circumcision’s different than castration,” Watters added.

Sure! And a puberty blocker is different from both. And so is hormone replacement therapy. And so is social transition. And those are all things that are targeted by these GOP bills. I understand that it’s to Watters’ advantage to frame this as Republicans tend to do, around surgery, even though they’re trying to go way beyond that. But it’s just wildly dishonest in the same way that Republican claims about “abortions up to the moment of birth” and “post-birth abortions” are dishonest.

Because the surgery thing was never really the point. The truth is that people on the anti-trans side of things just… don’t want trans people to be able to exist and live our lives as we have been. They don’t want trans women to be recognized in any official or unofficial capacity as women. They don’t want trans men to be recognized in any official or unofficial capacity as men. They want to take away medically necessary health care for trans people of all ages (not just kids). They want discrimination against trans people to be codified in law. So there’s no amount of, “Well, actually, the number of surgeries is really low…” or statistics about low regret rates or testimonies from people like Hunter Schafer or Kim Petras about how being able to medically transition as a minor made their lives better or anything that will win them over.

The number of acceptable trans people for them is zero. It’s why guys like Michael Knowles will openly say “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” to cheers on the CPAC stage, and then add, in case anyone missed it, “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing.” It’s why the Trump White House cheered a Supreme Court decision ostensibly about youth sports for helping the administration in its goal to “eliminate transgender insanity.”

So let’s end this charade where the right cites some “reasonable concern,” but then uses that to advance their project of a wholesale elimination of the very concept of trans people.

Government overreach

In April 2021, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed Arkansas’s ban on transition-related health care for minors, calling it “vast government overreach” that would set “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters involving young people.” He decried the bill as “a product of the cultural war in America.”

And he was right! Unfortunately, the state legislature overrode his veto the next day.

And in December 2023, Republican Governor Mike DeWine vetoed Ohio’s ban on transition-related health care for minors. He said his veto was “about protecting human life.” He also said, “These are gut-wrenching decisions that should be made [by] parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them. These are parents who have watched their children suffer for years, and have real concerns their children would not survive without it… Families are basing their decisions on the best medical advice they can get.”

Later, at a press conference, DeWine said that he believed decisions about health care “should be made by the people who love these kids the most, the parents.” The next month, the state legislature would override his veto.

Two Republican governors looked at these bills and landed exactly where El-Sayed did: government out of the exam room, parents making the call. Their own legislatures overrode them both.

The extreme position here was the bill, which took away parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children. It took decisions away from doctors, patients, their parents, and medical organizations, and put it in the hands of politicians. Entirely. Extreme. And again, this wasn’t just a ban on surgery. It banned surgery and hormone therapy. Oh, and just for good measure, to prove how this is totally just about health care, the bill also included a ban on trans girls playing on girls sports teams. Because sure, why not?

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Oh! And did I mention that despite the fact that the bill DeWine vetoed was supposed to be about banning medical treatment for minors, when the state went to implement the law, it tried to throw in some restrictions on health care for adults, too? It’s absolutely relentless, and again, dare I say “extreme.”

And unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s United States v. Skrmetti decision gave states the green light to pass these types of laws, which I think is horrific. Twenty-some states have. And this past December, the House passed a national version, 216–211, which would put a doctor in federal prison for up to ten years. It’s sitting in the Senate.

They’re trying to strong-arm Democrats into joining the crusade, and betting that the press will hand out credit for “moderating.” Democrats should say what El-Sayed said. Maybe skip the circumcision part.

And it’s important that the press understand what’s happening here, too. They want you to help them convince the public that it’d actually be radical to not enact sweeping new legislation.

Which brings me back to Monday night. Truly, there’s not much El-Sayed could have said that would have gotten a different result. Nothing short of endorsing the whole project would have satisfied them. He could have hedged, or split the difference, or said he wanted to look at the research, or any of the other things Democrats do when they’re scared of a question. Same “Dangerous obsession with trans kids” from Hannity.

So you may as well say what you believe: that the government needs to stay out of healthcare decisions.

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “He golfs and trades stocks. He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

“Natalie” refers to Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old White House aide. In 2020, Harp spoke at the Republican National Convention, sharing a story about her battle with bone cancer. Harp credited Trump with saving her life, citing a 2018 “right to try” law, something that was immediately disputed. She went on to host a show at One America News before leaving to work for Trump in 2022. She is a constant presence at his side, and seems to be (for more than a few reasons) a bit of a weirdo.

Did Ossoff insult Harp? No. Did Ossoff imply that there was anything sexual going on between Trump and Harp? No. Who was this an attack on? Donald Trump, for leaving his Secretary of State, his Treasury Secretary, and the entire White House press pool on a decoy plane so that Harp could ride with him on the safe one.

A closer look at the outrage

The “Trump saved her life” story got a lot of early traction despite the fact that Ossoff never mentioned Harp’s health. Not her cancer, not her treatment, not the 2018 law she touts. All he said was that she travels with the president. But it didn’t matter.

Right-wing accounts like Scott Jennings, @johnnymaga, Robby Starbuck, Katie Pavlich, Laura Loomer, and Rep. Brandon Gill all invoked her health in posts pushing back on Ossoff.

The second type of post was a claim that Ossoff was being sexist, which involved at least a small leap from what he actually said to what they think he meant. And look, I can get there. Maybe there’s a bit of innuendo there. But the leaps these right-wing critics took were a bit ridiculous.

CJ Pearson accused Ossoff of “implying Natalie Harp, a devoted, disciplined aide to President Trump, slept her way to the top.” Greg Price echoed that interpretation. Scott Jennings made multiple posts along these lines. Former White House communications staffer Abigail Jackson accused Ossoff of making “a misogynistic attack.” Mercedes Schlapp called it a “sexist remark.”

And finally, there’s the funniest group of all: people pretending that Harp is just some random woman and not a longtime aide to the president of the United States. Mark Levin, Larry O’Connor, Lee Zeldin, Bill Stepien, Colton Snedecor, and Josh McKoon all acted incredulous.

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The flop

None of these people are actually upset.

I know that’s a claim about the inside of someone’s head, so let me put it this way: no, I do not believe that the people who spend their days defending Donald “Quiet, Piggy“ Trump care about sexism or personal insults or looking out for women or anything like that. Sorry, I just don’t. I don’t believe that the people who defend the administration that turns deportation flights into TikTok content actually care about leaving people alone. So what’s it for?

Media coverage, mostly. A chance to accuse Democrats of being sexist or something like that. If enough people say a thing loudly enough, journalists will start putting out stories about how Ossoff’s comment “sparked backlash” or “accusations of sexism,” and now there’s suddenly a controversy that the press can ask other politicians about.

And it’s really, truly, genuinely funny to watch Scott Jennings and Mark Levin lecture anybody about how to talk about women, or to watch Newt Gingrich announce that Ossoff “owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.” Newt Gingrich, ffs!

But you’ve seen this before, just in a different kind of arena.

Where’s the first place the guys in those videos look as soon as they hit the ground? To the refs. Not at the players who “fouled” them. They’re trying to sell the ref on a version of reality that isn’t quite real. Sure, the player got bumped, but were they fouled? Meh. Maybe?

And once enough people agree that a foul happened, “Ossoff’s sexist remark about Natalie Harp” just becomes reality in a lot of spheres. Maybe it’ll stick. Maybe it won’t. One way to help these narratives stick is for Democrats to take the right-wing framing at face value, denouncing their own side as a show that they’re not just some sort of partisan. And that’s exactly what David Axelrod did. He called the speech “a brutal takedown,” and then handed them the thing they’d spent three days digging for: “But two words in it, ‘with Natalie’ seemed gratuitous and unnecessary.”

Gah!

And, I guess… just… duh. Obviously.

“Engagement is easy to measure, so the platforms use it as the primary metric to assess user interest in the content,” said paper co-author Ziv Epstein in a press release published by Stanford. “They are saying, in effect, engagement equals values, but it’s not that simple.”

And yes, Elon Musk is almost certainly doing things with the X algorithm to try to push the public towards his views. The pushing part is just a fact: an experiment published in Nature in February put nearly 5,000 people on either the “For You” algorithmic feed or the reverse-chronological one of just the accounts they followed for seven weeks. Those on the algorithmic feed drifted rightward on policy priorities, on Trump’s prosecutions, on Ukraine, and other issues. That same feed also ran 58% fewer posts from actual news organizations. Yikes!

But as it turns out, some of this is on us, too, and on how we interact on social media.

“The message we take away is that the values that we hold – what we really care about – should be just as informative to the platforms as engagement,” paper co-author Michael Bernstein said. “Right now, we engage with all sorts of content – sometimes because we agree with it, and sometimes because we’re angry at it – but the platforms misinterpret it all as a kind of desire for more of that kind of content.”

This got me thinking about how much of my own feed I’ve built by hand, one angry reply at a time.

Who are these replies even for?

A week or two ago, on Threads, I replied to an anti-trans post about the WNBA.

I knew better. I have known better for years. But it was one of those posts about women’s basketball being under siege from a trans player, and I did the thing I always do, which is write something back saying that trans people actually had nothing to do with the manufactured outrage being stoked by the right.

And then my feed was that. Just that. Only that. Literally nothing but posts about how trans people are ruining the WNBA, bathrooms, sports, and locker rooms.

For days I opened the app to a flood of people I’d never seen before explaining that people like me are “men.” There wasn’t much actually about sports policy. Mostly misgendering, AI-generated slop images of burly men with pigtails dunking on women, over and over, in a scroll-friendly format. It was the most miserable my phone has been in a bit, and I did it to myself. (There has never been a trans woman in the WNBA. Fox News has spent more than thirteen hours on the league since late June anyway, hours of it on trans athletes. I hate being at the center of a culture war! I’ll probably write something about all this soon.)

In any case, between my experience on Threads and this story about the X algorithm, I’ve been thinking a little bit about who I’m replying to and why I’m doing it. I’ve always kind of thought of my replies as not being for the benefit of the post’s author, but for others reading the comments. But isn’t that a little silly? It’s been like 15 years of this stuff. Have replies to posts about things that I disagree with actually changed anything in this world? Doubtful.

What I have done is told these various social algorithms to feed me more nonsense that enrages me, that this content is good and should be promoted into more people’s feeds. I’m basically helping to spread a virus.

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Knowing all of this has not stopped me and probably won’t

“Don’t feed the trolls“ is old-school social media advice, and contested advice at that, for reasons mostly having to do with the fact that harassers don’t actually stop when you ignore them. Well-meaning people have given me this advice hundreds of times, and I’ve given it to others a hundred more. Why is it that I can’t just… do it?

I think some of it has to do with the fact that ignoring, muting, and blocking are invisible actions. And scrolling past ragebait can feel weirdly like conceding the point or argument. Replying is the only thing that actually feels like doing something, even if what I’m doing is ultimately unproductive.

I do find it a lot easier to ignore posts I disagree with when they have to do with topics I’m not super passionate about. Like, oh, cool, you didn’t like The Odyssey? Neat. No biggie. But it’s a much harder sell when the person you’re tempted to reply to is saying something about whether people like me should be allowed to use public restrooms, get called by the names we want to be called, and protected from discrimination. And it’s harder still when I can see that most of the replies agree with the original post. Letting it go is difficult, so I don’t let it go.

I’m going to make a point of trying to reply to things I actually want more of on the internet, and of not handing those replies to people whose entire job is winding me up. I doubt I’ll be any good at it.

For the uninitiated, Jubilee is a media company that markets itself as being about empathy and bridging divides, though it largely profits from manufactured conflict. There’s no shortage of incisive criticism of the company’s formats, and it’s worth checking some of it out; for my part, I find most of the Jubilee catalog grating.

But back to Tim Pool: moderate.

If you don’t know who Pool is, the short version is that he’s the host of Timcast IRL, a show on the right-wing video platform Rumble. He made a name for himself livestreaming the Occupy Wall Street protests from his phone, then worked at Vice for a bit before going off and doing his own thing. For years he pitched himself as a guy the left had abandoned, a Bernie voter and self-described “disaffected liberal” who couldn’t recognize his own side anymore. The drift started around 2016 and never really stopped. By August 2020 he was publicly backing Trump, and he’s been a superfan since. In September 2024, it came out that Pool was being paid $100,000 per episode by the Russian government to produce pro-Russia video content ahead of that year’s election. Pool didn’t know who was funding the project at the time. Here’s a Daily Show clip containing some of Pool’s “greatest hits”

And look, he says a lot of really extreme stuff on his show.

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“Well, the whole thing is a multiple vehicle pile-up. Let me start with the president. The president says it was caused by vandals. I don’t know whether he really believes that, or it’s part of his political messaging, or he’s just thinking out loud. You and I both know the president well. He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought. I’m not saying he doesn’t really believe it, I just don’t know. Now, the stakes are a lot higher for U.S. Attorney Pirro. You can’t lie to a federal judge. If she can’t prove her case, she was right to pull back. Because if you fool around with a federal judge, you will find out. When I was in private practice, one time I put my briefcase on a brand new conference table bought by a federal judge. And he got so mad, I’ll never forget, I thought I was going to get to spend overnight with Bubba in central lockup. Federal judges will not tolerate. And so I don’t know why she filed the suit without having a — doing a full investigation. She says she relied on the Department of Interior. But she was smart to pull it back.”

Excuse me? He doesn’t know whether Trump actually believes what he’s saying, “or if it’s part of his political messaging”?

A GOP senator sat on Meet the Press and said he’s just not sure if the president actually believes that Hearn committed a crime despite there being no evidence that anyone vandalized the pool at all (which should worry us about Trump’s connection to reality), or if it’s just part of Trump’s political messaging (which should worry us about the fact that Trump would then knowingly be trying to throw this random guy behind bars for a decade for absolutely no reason). Neither is comforting, and both are pretty gigantic scandals that should be setting off alarms all over the country.

Welker’s only follow-up question was whether Kennedy believes grand jury records in Hearn’s case should be made public. Kennedy said yes.

But is the press really just going to move on from this story? Is there really so much going on in the world that stuff like this happens and we just sort of shrug it off and move on? I know that the reflecting pool saga is probably pretty low on most people’s lists of times Trump has acted like a mad king during his second term in office, but I guess I’m just having a hard time letting go of the fact that Trump is still trying to put Hearn, a man who was part of Team USA at the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Olympics, in prison for a decade despite the fact that even Pirro, a total Trump loyalist, has admitted in court that he didn’t commit any crime. That is completely nuts to me.

You don’t actually have to pick one

Kennedy gives us a few options for what’s going on with Trump, and none of them are good. It doesn’t really matter which one is right, because it’s all the same to Hearn.

If Trump actually believes what he’s saying, then the president of the United States is detached from reality, instructing the Justice Department to pursue charges based on whatever’s going on in his head. If he doesn’t believe it, then he’s spent seven weeks demanding a decade in prison for a man he knows is innocent.

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That’s David Ellison in the New York Times on Tuesday, arguing that the man who wants to buy CNN can be trusted with it. He won’t have to, though. An owner who wants coverage moved doesn’t sit in the control room rewriting chyrons and personally spiking stories. He hires an editor who shares his ideological vision, and the editor hires the correspondents. Then those ideologically-aligned employees do all the things that determine which segments run, which stories never get reported out, which guests get booked, and how reality gets described to the public. All the while, the owner gets to spend the rest of his life accurately saying that he never put a finger on the scale — a phrase Ellison uses himself as his reason for having stayed quiet while a dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild sued to stop his $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Whether technically true or not, nobody has to take Ellison’s promise on faith, because he’s made the same promise before about a different newsroom (and we’re currently seeing how that’s been working out). Notably, there are two names that never appear in his op-ed. One is Bari Weiss. The other is Donald Trump, the president whose FCC approved Ellison’s last merger, and who said in December that it was “imperative that CNN be sold.”

So how should we look at Ellison’s op-ed? Let’s look at his record.

Everything he’s promising CNN, he already promised CBS News

When the FCC signed off on Ellison’s merger of Skydance with Paramount last July, it cited Skydance’s written commitment that CBS News’ reporting would be “fair, unbiased, and fact-based,” and that the company would hire an ombudsman to “evaluate complaints of bias.” Yes, the goal for reporting should be for it to be fair, unbiased, and fact-based. Of course. And hiring an ombudsman or public editor is a fine idea. But it quickly became clear what was really happening.

Kenneth Weinstein got the ombudsman job that September. From 2011 to 2020, he ran a neoconservative think tank called the Hudson Institute. In 2020, he was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan, though the Senate never acted on his nomination. And in 2024, he gave $6,600 to Trump, $5,000 to the pro-Trump Save America PAC and $10,900 to the Republican National Committee, along with donations over the years to a number of individual Republicans.

But unlike a traditional ombudsman, who typically provides reporting to the public about the goings-on in the newsroom, story selection, how it’s being reported out, and so on, Weinstein doesn’t have a public-facing role. Instead, he is there to evaluate claims of bias and raise his concerns with Paramount’s president and television head, who will then take them to the president of CBS News. Basically, Weinstein’s role is making sure that CBS News remains sufficiently pro-Trump for the president’s liking. Cool.

In October, Ellison brought on Bari Weiss, naming her the editor-in-chief of CBS News, after Paramount bought her Free Press media company for a reported $150 million. Sure, with zero TV news experience under her belt, she was unbelievably unqualified for this new role that had been created specifically for her. But she seems to have been brought on to remake CBS News in the image of her “anti-woke” Free Press more than to actually run a successful news company. When announcing her hire, Ellison said something that he’d echo in this op-ed 10 months later: “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”

In May, magazine writer and documentary producer with no TV news experience Nick Bilton was hired to be the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. By the end of the month, longtime 60 Minutes correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were gone, and Scott Pelley a week or so after that, fired for telling Bilton he was “murdering” the program. Upon his exit, Pelley shared a note to Instagram:

“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.

Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how honest journalism is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight.’ Most of my colleagues at CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”

Pelley told the New York Times that in the wake of Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killings, Weiss emailed then-60 Minutes Executive Producer Tanya Simon, instructing her to make protesters look more violent in the story and to describe Good as driving toward the officer who shot her. This was all despite the fact that Pelley and his team had already taken steps to “identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive,” to “find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively.” He was already taking steps to both sides the extrajudicial murder of American citizens. It still wasn’t enough for Weiss. “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before,” said Pelley in the Times piece.

Vega shared her own thoughts on the ideological takeover of 60 Minutes in a note shared with the New York Times:

“I was fired today. My contract as a correspondent for 60 Minutes was not set to expire until March 2027.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for my colleagues at 60 Minutes and the stories that air every Sunday. But I very much fear what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.

In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.

Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.

I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience, a phrase I borrow from a colleague who has also fought to keep questionable editorial suggestions away from the facts. I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity. I am far from the only 60 Minutes correspondent who has asked herself, “What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?”

I am proud of the work I did for 60 Minutes. This season alone I was part of teams that won two of the highest honors in our profession — a George Polk award and a duPont-Columbia award for our coverage of Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s Cecot prison. And not for nothing, I climbed to Mount Everest.

I also walk away with an honor no one can take from me: I was the first Latina correspondent to ever be on 60 Minutes.

Today I lost an amazing job. But I still have my integrity.

To my former colleagues, continue to hold the line.

In June, Writers Guild of America East president Tom Fontana issued a statement:

“Like many of you, I have been alarmed by recent developments at CBS News. In the past year, CBS has enacted cruel and needless layoffs across the organization and shuttered CBS News Radio. In addition, based on a string of public reporting and confidential reports from WGAE members, it is clear that CBS brass is engaged in a near-constant level of editorial interference that would have previously been unthinkable.

Over the course of the last few weeks, CBS has laid off or fired multiple newsroom workers and journalists, most recently Scott Pelley; CBS management is apparently too thin-skinned to handle the honest scrutiny of their own journalists.”

Vega, on stage at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in New Orleans last month, described being pushed by management to falsely report that the mayor of Minneapolis had directed his police to confront federal immigration agents. She’d also been told to find footage of protesters attacking undercover ICE agents. Her team went looking, but again, this wasn’t a thing. In 25 years of journalism, she said that “never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.”

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You probably already know about the CECOT segment, which Weiss pulled just hours before broadcast, airing a month later but only after it had leaked online. And Pelley talked about the meddling in the Good and Pretti stories. But just this week, we learned about a new example of editorial interference. Apparently, before her firing, Alfonsi had been working on a story for 60 Minutes about an investigation being led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) into Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to a number of banks. It was spiked by Weiss.

From a piece in The American Prospect:

“Wyden’s report also details multiple instances in which powerful figures used their positions to obstruct his investigation. In one glaring example, he described CBS suppressing an interview he did with former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi in March. That was five months after David Ellison, a Trump ally and child of billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS through its parent company Paramount and appointed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss to run the network.

Wyden discussed his [suspicious activity reports] investigation with Alfonsi, and possible consequences for banks, as part of a larger segment on the conduct of Wall Street bankers and the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands. But Weiss fired Alfonsi once Ellison took over. “David Ellison’s handpicked partisan lieutenant killed the segment and fired the lead reporter on the piece,” Wyden told the Prospect.

The experience gave Wyden ‘a first-hand view of how the far-right takeover of corporate media is protecting predators and standing in the way of justice … Blocking corporate media consolidation and supporting independent media is absolutely vital to defending our democracy and getting justice for ultra-wealthy criminals.’”

CBS says it’s “proud of our aggressive and extensive reporting on the Epstein scandal,” that it is continuing its reporting, and called Wyden’s claims “categorically false.” Okay, sure.

Luckily for Ellison, Weiss, and the rest of the management over at CBS News (and possibly CNN before long), the supply of these types of embarrassing stories will eventually run dry. As Vega explained in her exit note, teams had “held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.” That’s a big part of how censorship works. It’s about what stories we don’t tell as much as the ones we do. Eventually, anyone truly bothered by the censorship will leave and be replaced by someone who fits the ideological mold.

We’re watching the installation of the right-wing apparatus. It’s loud. It’s clumsy. It leaks. But over time, it’ll become quiet, where the meddling is invisible because it’s built in. CBS News is in the process of being irrevocably corrupted, and CNN could be next.

Back on June 21, the paper ran a column by Rob Henderson, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, under the headline, “The latest data on baby names reveals a progressive paradox.” A week later, the Post Opinions account put out a video version with Henderson delivering the argument to camera. That’s when it ended up on my radar. Here’s how it opens:

“The most progressive parents in the United States are giving their children the most traditional names. The latest baby name data from Washington, D.C., reads like a roll call of 19th-century senators and their wives. Lucy, Eleanor and Caroline for girls. Charles, John and George for boys. These are not the names you might expect from one of the most progressive cities in the country.”

Not the names you might expect? From whom, though? Based on what? Weirdly, the column never gives coherent answers to those questions.

The liberal in this column doesn’t exist, and neither does the belief she’s supposedly betraying

Henderson constructs a bit of a straw man, ascribing beliefs to liberals and progressives that they don’t actually hold… based on beliefs on related issues that they do hold? It’s weird.

“Upper-middle-class professionals often talk a big game about openness, inclusion and social experimentation. They tend to say that people should be free to invent themselves,” writes Henderson.

Okay?

“They are wary of old rules and outdated hierarchies. Baby name experts told NBC News that ridiculing an unusual name can reveal ‘uncomfortable classism.’ The unease suggests that even those who preach against the judgment know it is real,” he continues.1

Yes. And?

He goes on to highlight the fact that people with unique names often face social and professional penalties. I guess the point he’s trying to make here is that… if liberals don’t think someone should be discriminated against or mocked for having a strange name, they have an obligation to give their kids odd names? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Actually, strike that; it makes no sense at all.

Henderson’s (extremely questionable) framework is “luxury beliefs,” his own coinage, which he defines as ideas that “confer status on members of the upper class at little cost while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.” (It’s similar to “virtue signaling” in how it gets used.) As it applies to names: rich progressives loudly insist that weird names are great, give their own kids something boring, and the poorer parents who took them at their word about how awesome odd names are get their kid’s resume thrown in the trash.

If this is hypocrisy, there needs to be someone actually doing this. Is there? Here is the closest the column comes to producing one:

“An educated professional in a blue city may say that all names are equally valid. Or she might go one step further and say that unconventional names should be celebrated. She might even go so far as to suggest that giving your child a traditional name is a sign of unoriginality or narrow-mindedness.”

“May.” “Might.” “Might even go so far as to.”

No name, quote, tweet, book, survey, or study. There’s not even an anecdote from a dinner party. This liberal is made out of a handful of hypotheticals and a guess about what people like her think and do. Henderson’s entire argument rests on this hypothetical woman’s shoulders.

It’s another entry into the category of “making up a guy to get mad at,” a favorite genre of mine. The formula never changes: Liberals claim to be fine with [weird but harmless thing]. And yet liberals do not personally do [weird but harmless thing]. Checkmate.

Yes! That’s how tolerance works.

Nobody holds the belief that “everyone should give their kids unusual names.” That’s a strawman that Henderson seems to have invented from whole cloth so that he can then accuse them of hypocrisy. Liberals’ actual position is that you shouldn’t hold a person’s name against them, which is about how you treat other people, not a set of instructions for filling out your own kid’s birth certificate. Thinking a kid named Nevaeh deserves the same callback as a kid named Charles does not obligate someone to name anyone Nevaeh. There’s no hypocrisy here.

And one of the reasons liberals hold that position, in case anyone wants to check, is that the discrimination in hiring is real and it’s been measured, especially when it comes to names coded as Black.

The belief is that employers shouldn’t be doing this, not that parents owe their kids something unusual. Henderson took a claim about how hiring managers behave, invented something that liberals supposedly believe (that kids should have unique names), saw that the most common names in a solidly liberal city were, well, common, and called it hypocrisy.

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A list of the 10 most popular names is always going to be a list of popular names

There’s a second problem, and it’s the kind that should have been caught by an editor.

Henderson’s evidence is a top-10 list. A top-10 list of baby names is, by definition, a list of names that lots of people picked. That’s how names get on the list. A name cannot chart unless thousands of strangers independently landed on the same one. You could not build a top-10 list out of unusual names if you tried. The unusual ones are unusual. That’s the whole deal.

So Henderson went and looked at the most popular names in Washington and found that they were... popular. Yeah, man! That’s how it works. You’re never going to see some wild, obscure name atop the list of popular baby names. Ever. And it doesn’t say something about society or whatever. It just says

One researcher he cites found close to the opposite of what he says they found

Henderson writes: “J. Eric Oliver, a political scientist, has studied naming patterns and found that educated mothers tend to favor common, conventional names.”

The paper he links is Oliver, Wood and Bass in Political Behavior. Here’s the sentence from the abstract (bolded emphasis mine):

“Although higher status mothers of all races favor more popular birth names, higher status, white liberal mothers more often choose uncommon, culturally obscure birth names.”

This marks the second time in his column where he cut off the back half of a sentence that contradicts his point. He used the first half of that sentence, sure. But the second half is the finding that high-status liberal mothers are the exception, which is to say the group his entire column is about, doing the thing he says they don’t do. It’s in the same sentence he took the first half from. Groan…

So what are we even doing here? What’s the point of this column?

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” It’s shifted hard to the right, leaning into “owning the libs.”

“Luxury beliefs” is a very good tool for this. Feed it anything and it hands back the same answer: the real problem is liberals and the left. Is it factual? Who cares! Checking the numbers underneath is somebody else’s job, and evidently nobody’s.

Once the replies started coming in, Henderson went back to promote the video anyway, with a note: “The very calm and very sane replies indicate that maybe I’m onto something.”

Sure. Once being wrong counts as evidence that you’re right, there’s nothing left in the world that could talk you out of it.

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At one point during his speech, Trump got around to Kaitlan Collins, who had just accepted the WHCA’s award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure from Wolf Blitzer, which she earned covering the Oval Office Zelensky blowup last year. Trump congratulated her, sort of: the award was fake, he told the room, and she shouldn’t have won it. She never smiles, he went on, and she really should, considering what a nice position she has over at CNN, which he reminded everyone is fake news. “So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.” (He ran the same routine on her in the Oval Office in February, mid-question about Epstein’s survivors.)

Then the bit. He’d heard Collins had landed a big sponsorship, except “it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.” Mulvaney, he claimed, cost Bud Light “$35 billion in market cap.” And he closed with a line about how he’d never want to give her a job.

On Sunday morning he posted a follow-up to his personal Truth Social account: an AI-edited image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body, lifted from the 2023 Bud Light video.

And look at what that image actually shows. A smiling woman in a black dress and gloves, holding a beer, a few more cans lined up on the table. That’s the entire picture. The insult is something the viewer has to supply.

Everybody supplied it. That’s what I keep coming back to. The bit bombed, sure. But nobody in that ballroom needed the joke explained, and nobody leaned over to ask what he meant. Neither did anyone who read about it the next morning. The joke has exactly one moving part, the assumption that being compared to a trans woman is a step down, and that assumption is so widely shared in 2026 that the president of the United States can build a punchline on it, on live television, without ever saying it out loud.

Then came the objections. They ran on the same assumption.

“Apologize to Kaitlan, specifically”

The most instructive objection came from Rahm Emanuel, 2028-curious and on CNN’s payroll as a contributor. Trump, he told the Washington Examiner, “should apologize to Kaitlan Collins specifically,” and to all the journalists he insults. Mulvaney’s name doesn’t come up. This is the same guy who gave Megyn Kelly a flat “Can a man become a woman? No,” then stood by it for months, and who told NPR “That’s not what I said” when asked whether that denies trans people exist. (He does.) (I’ve written about Rahm before.)

CNN stood behind its anchor, calling her “an exceptional, trusted journalist.” Every word of it earned. But every word of it about Collins.

To be clear: Collins deserved defending. What Trump does to her (trashing her work, grading her face, ordering her to smile) is its own familiar ugliness, and I’m glad people pushed back. But I’m a little saddened by how few people seemed to realize that Mulvaney was being insulted here (repeatedly), too.

Her little musicals

On Sunday evening, Mulvaney posted a four-minute video to TikTok and Instagram. I’m going to give you the whole thing, because it deserves to be read whole.

Hi, is this a good time? Well, it’s definitely an interesting time, because my name is Dylan Mulvaney, and the president of the United States said my name in his speech four times on Friday night. I couldn’t respond right away, because yesterday I had tickets to see Meg Stalter in Oh, Mary!, but now I think I’d like to say a little something.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on her award and tell her that I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way. And I hope that she keeps doing all the great work.

Now, the president also brought up a video I did over three years ago. And mind you, I’ve been kind of flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile, just doing my little musicals, singing, dancing, and yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later. And it seems to me that I might be the one that got away for these men. I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.

And when I first heard that the president put me on his diss track, I was like, well, that’s not good. Now, a few weeks ago, I would have probably been more upset about this. But luckily, I was ghosted last month by a hookup who I really liked. And what I realized from that experience was that I shouldn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be with me. So maybe I shouldn’t want to be professionally supported by an administration that doesn’t personally support me, or so many others in this country. Food for thought.

In fact, maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually the greatest compliment of all, because it puts me in the company of some of the most brilliant, empathetic people in our world today.

But I do still wonder: why is it so important to them that I don’t find success? What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.

So now I have some action items for us. Are you ready?

Number one: Support trans and nonbinary people. This is the time. I am sounding the alarm. We need you to stand up for us, vote for us, donate to our causes, hire us, and support the businesses who hire us. But most importantly, love us. That is what we need more than anything right now, publicly and proudly.

Number two: If a young person is seeking acceptance, we are going to love them. And if you are a young person watching this, I need you to hold onto every piece of yourself tightly, especially the parts that they are trying to make you feel guilty about, or trying to scare you into abandoning. And I need you to find people who will help you carry those pieces into a kinder day, okay?

Okay. And number three: When they try to judge you for your support of us, take that as the greatest compliment. Ladies, when they tell you that you look like a trans woman, wear it like a medal. Men, when they tell you that being attracted to trans women makes you gay, I want you to Hilary Duff PSA their ass so hard that they don’t even know what just happened. And to the dolls: let’s have each other’s backs.

And lastly, to the president: thank you for reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew. And to quote my favorite recording artist, Shea Diamond: I am America.

Love you.

We’ve now spent a solid decade fighting about cancel culture, about whether anyone should be ruined over an old tweet or a resurfaced college photo. Okay. Run that framework on Dylan Mulvaney and look for the offense. The complete inventory: one sponsored Instagram video promoting a March Madness contest, and a novelty can the company mailed her with her face on it. That’s the whole file. No statement to disavow, no scandal to relitigate, no victim anywhere in it. A beer ad.

And I’ll be honest: I’ve found plenty of Mulvaney’s content reductive over the years. Cringe, even. It could not matter less. Her content has never been the thing on trial. If her posts aren’t for you, the technology for not watching them is free and works great.

So here’s who we’re actually talking about. A musical theater kid who documented her transition online, did one sponsored post for a beer company, and has been screamed at ever since. Nobody has ever said what would end it, because nothing would. The problem is not something she says or does, but who she is. And that’s just bigotry.

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Bud Light got to come back, but not Dylan

“I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan any time soon,” said Trump on Friday. This has always been the point. When the boycott was at full boil in 2023, I wrote that its real goal was making companies think twice about hiring a trans person for anything, at any level. Mulvaney said something similar that fall: a company that hires a trans person and then goes quiet “gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.”

The company’s rehabilitation went fine. In October 2023, with the boycott still going, Bud Light became the official beer of the UFC, in what was reported as the biggest sponsorship deal in the promotion’s history. And that deal is how, this June, Bud Light’s logo ended up printed on the Octagon on the White House South Lawn, at the UFC event Trump spent part of Friday’s speech bragging about. (I wrote about that spectacle when it happened.)

The company’s offense was proximity to a trans woman, and proximity can be worked off. You reorganize the marketing department, you sponsor the right fights, you put your logo where the president parties, and all is forgiven. Her offense was being the trans woman. And there’s no working that off.

About all that power we supposedly have

She can’t come back, because she’s needed right where she is. For any of this to look like a fair fight, Dylan Mulvaney has to be enormous.

The whole genre of “super powerful trans people” runs on an imaginary trans person: the one shrieking “did you just assume my gender!?” at strangers, the one demanding you memorize neopronouns. (I’ve been out as trans for fourteen years. I’ve never met a single person who goes by “xir.” I’m sure such people exist, but they are nowhere near common enough for this to be something you spend any amount of time thinking about.) The imaginary trans person is everywhere, powerful, hair-trigger, coming for your kid’s locker room.

Here’s how the people with actual power spent last month. The White House published a press release titled “Supreme Court Bolsters President Trump’s Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity.” That’s the real name of a real document on whitehouse.gov, posted in the middle of Pride Month, listing the administration’s moves against trans people as a stack of wins. That’s pretty scary, and it goes beyond “reasonable concerns” that people claim to have about sports and youth medicine and whatnot.

Same government that, since the Supreme Court cleared the policy in November, now only issues passports showing your sex assigned at birth. Renew yours, and the letter reverts, no matter what your license, your doctors, your birth certificate, or your entire life says. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent warned that the policy exposes trans people to “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination.”

And the opposition party? Three weeks ago, days after that Supreme Court ruling, Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, told the Toledo Blade: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Boys. Her word. She’s got company: Gavin Newsom opened his podcast in 2025 by agreeing with Charlie Kirk about trans athletes. Some Democrats have pushed back; Tim Walz called the party’s retreat a mistake. But with the exception of J.B. Pritzker, the defense almost never comes from anyone who wants to be president, which really worries me about where things are headed.

The butt of the joke

I said at the top that I wanted to sit with this. Here’s where it landed.

The most powerful man alive stood in front of the American press corps and used a cheerful musical theater performer as the worst thing he could think to call a woman. Everyone understood him. The room understood, the headlines understood, the apology demand understood: it is an insult to be compared to a trans woman, as society tends to view us as weird little goblins. The one person who seemed to reject the premise was Mulvaney.

And Mulvaney had to be lovely about it. Again. In 2023 she spent months “scared to leave my house.” Last year she told People she finally felt “a thousand times stronger,” healed, in a good place. Then the president picked at the scab from a podium, and her job was to answer with grace. She did. Everyone spent Monday admiring it. Nobody should need this much of it.

You’ve probably read the rest: Trump’s speech was an hour of insults, and it flopped. CNN’s Brian Stelter says Trump “bombed” so thoroughly that he accidentally proved the dinner’s point. The Daily Beast went with “Humiliated.” And sure. The jokes were terrible. But I think these reviews are grading the wrong performance.

I wrote in April, after a gunman ended the first attempt at this dinner, that the correspondents’ association should let the whole thing end. They rescheduled it instead.

A performer bombs when he wants a room’s approval and can’t get it, and approval was never what Trump was there to collect. He already had what he needed from the press corps: attendance, a captive audience. It rescheduled its biggest night around him and sat him at the head table. What he wanted was the rest of it: the chance to stand in front of a profession he’s spent a year and a half suing, subpoenaing, banning, and defunding, insult it to its face for an hour on live television, and watch it hold still. He was there specifically for the silence.

Resist?

This is what standing up to Trump looked like on Friday night, according to the people who will defend the dinner.

The WHCA played a video featuring a computer-generated James Madison, who appeared onscreen to inform the room that “The government doesn’t get to shut the press up.” A living journalist saying that sentence into the microphone, to the president’s face, might have been a risk. A cartoon of a man who died in 1836 saying it is weak slop. AI-resurrected founders are usually a PragerU and Glenn Beck genre, the kind of thing I cover as right-wing propaganda. The press corps has now adopted the right’s format in its own defense. That’s roughly where we are.

There were awards, like the one Blitzer presented.

And there was Weijia Jiang, the outgoing WHCA president, opening the night with “We are back. We will not be intimidated.” She meant the gunman from April. But the man who intimidates the American press for a living? Sat beside her on the dais as her guest.

The genre’s well established by now. When Trump banned the AP from the Oval Office last year, the WHCA passed out “First Amendment” pins. At the April dinner, Jiang promised the press would keep covering this administration “whether you like it or not.” Pins and cartoons and toasts: okay.

When Trump announced in March that he’d attend, he posted that the correspondents had asked him to be “the Honoree” at their own dinner. They didn’t technically “honor” him, but if the association ever corrected him on that, I can’t find it. The right spent the weekend running its usual bit about how the press can dish it out but can’t take it. The truth is that taking it was all the press did. Politely, even.

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Don’t say they weren’t warned

Days before the dinner, more than 500 retired and former journalists joined eight press freedom groups, the Committee to Protect Journalists among them, in an open letter telling the WHCA that celebrating the First Amendment “in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it” is hypocrisy.

Ten days before the dinner, Trump’s Justice Department was holding grand jury subpoenas over four New York Times reporters for their coverage of the Qatari jet, demanding testimony and phone records, including records belonging to their family members. The department pulled the subpoenas the day before the dinner, once a federal judge started asking whether the application contained perjury. The week before the dinner, Trump publicly called for revoking NBC’s and ABC’s broadcast licenses after they declined to carry his recent primetime address live. And back in November, the president declared that elected officials urging troops to refuse illegal orders had committed “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Does this sound like a man who respects the First Amendment?

And there’s no clean modern precedent for it. However, you can argue that John Adams jailing editors under the Sedition Act or Woodrow Wilson imprisoning dissenters under the Espionage Act are just as bad but different. The current attack on the press pulls every lever at once (the regulators, the courts, the licenses, the owners, the platforms, the money), and it’s how the United States just fell to 64th in the world on press freedom, its lowest ranking ever, in an index citing the defunded public broadcasters, the gutted Voice of America, and the detention and deportation of journalist Mario Guevara. Clayton Weimers, who runs Reporters Without Borders’ US office, skips the hedging entirely: Trump is “the single biggest threat to American press freedom today.”

The correspondents’ association read the letter and answered with a statement:

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner exists because the First Amendment matters most when it’s under pressure... our choice to gather as journalists, newsmakers and the president in the same room is a reminder of what a free press means to this country.

But gathering in that particular room was never the only option. The New York Times hasn’t bought a ticket to this thing since 2008, for reasons its former executive editor Dean Baquet once summed up: the dinner tells readers “we are all in it together and it is all a game.” The WHCA could have done any number of other things here. There was the awards-without-the-gala option, the no-invitation option, the no-thank-yous option. But no.

The letter called all this hypocritical. But Hypocrisy is a values problem. What the news business has with this president is an accounting problem.

For those who would like to financially support The Present Age on a non-Substack platform, please be aware that I also publish these pieces to my Patreon.

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The price of a not-so-free press

So let’s do the books.

In December 2024, Disney paid Trump $15 million, plus another million in legal fees, over one sentence George Stephanopoulos said on the air. Meta paid $25 million to settle his deplatforming suit; X paid about $10 million for the same. Paramount paid $16 million over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview, and the FCC approved the company’s sale to Skydance just weeks later.

Then there’s YouTube. Google paid $24.5 million in September, and $22 million of it is earmarked for the White House ballroom. The fortified ballroom Trump spent part of Friday’s speech advertising, the one he suggested could host this dinner next year, is being built partly out of money a media company paid him to drop a lawsuit.

Paul Farhi ran the tally earlier this month: roughly $86 million from media and tech companies so far, spread across more than 30 defamation suits, exactly none of which Trump has ever won in court. He doesn’t need to win them. The filing of the lawsuits are themselves a show of force.

On the other hand, I’ve already explained what happens to journalists who publish stories Trump doesn’t like. That’s the menu every institution with a table at the Waldorf last Friday lives under: pay him, or bleed. Most of the owners paid.

IMAX 70mm tickets went on sale a full year ahead of release, presales crashed ticketing servers when they opened wide in June, and Variety found fans planning cross-country trips around 70mm screenings, including a couple who were reportedly delaying pregnancies over seat availability.

The movie finally opened on July 17, and it made $124.5 million in North America and $264.1 million worldwide, the biggest global opening Nolan has ever had. The record it broke belonged to The Dark Knight Rises and had stood since 2012. Reviews came in at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the best of his career, opening-night crowds gave it an A on CinemaScore, and the verified audience score (the Rotten Tomatoes number you can only vote in if you actually bought a ticket) sits at 97 percent as of this writing.

So sure, there’s an easy piece to be written about how everyone who swore this movie would bomb turned out to be wrong, and plenty of people have already written it. I keep getting stuck on a different number, though, one that has nothing to do with ticket sales. Over opening weekend, July 17 through 20, The Economist and YouGov asked 1,602 American adults whether it was appropriate or inappropriate “for Black actress Lupita Nyong’o to portray Helen of Troy” in the film. Thirty percent said inappropriate.

Thirty percent! Over a casting choice in a movie based on a 2,700-year-old poem.

And that opinion is brand new, which is the part I can’t get past. Nobody held it a year ago, because there was nothing to hold it about; the roles hadn’t even been announced yet. Somebody had to go build it, and the building took roughly six months and happened mostly on one website. The campaign against The Odyssey failed as a boycott but worked as a proof of concept, and this piece is about both halves.

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And because this is the same Pete Hegseth who spent his first weeks in office moving to purge trans people from the military and cut off their hormone therapy, you already know what happened next. Rep. Pramila Jayapal declared the program gender-affirming care and said it “completely debunks all of Republicans’ attacks on trans people.” Tammy Duckworth, my own senator here in Illinois, said it sounded “like gender-affirming care to me.” One viral post cracked, “Babe wake up, they’re transmascing the military.” Common Dreams ran a whole roundup of the dunks under the headline “’Literally Gender Affirming Care’: Hegseth Mocked for Plan to Offer US Soldiers Testosterone.” Within hours, “Hegseth is doing gender-affirming care” was the take.

I get the impulse. I really do.

And I wish everyone would knock it off.

A few disclaimers before anybody gets mad at me. I’m speaking for myself here, one trans woman with a newsletter, and I don’t claim to represent anyone else. I know these jokes come from allies. I know the point is to call out the cruelty of banning care for one group while handing it out to another. I know plenty of trans people make the same joke, and I’m not interested in running a purity test. But I wince every single time I see it, and I want to explain why. Again, I am just speaking for myself here.

Two things happen whenever somebody fires off this particular gotcha. The first is that healthcare I spent years fighting to get becomes a punchline. The second is that a political movement with a perfectly coherent plan for people like me gets talked about as if it simply made a logic error. Both are bad. The second one might be worse.

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The punchline is my healthcare

Start with the healthcare. Gender-affirming care is the medical treatment for gender dysphoria: hormone therapy, sometimes surgery, prescribed under clinical guidelines built over decades and recognized as medically necessary by dozens of major medical organizations, including the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics. If you’ve never felt dysphoria, I can only tell you how it felt to me: wrong, all the time, in a way I couldn’t reason my way out of. A depression with no obvious floor. Sick at the sight of my own reflection. A flinch at every “he.” This care is what helped make that stop. For a lot of us, it’s the thing that made everything else in life possible.

Getting it is a whole other story. I’ve been through the gatekeeping myself. Separate letters from separate providers certifying that I was who I said I was. A years-long waitlist. Insurance fights over care that the people writing the checks would clearly rather not pay for. It’s grueling.

Now picture the 42-year-old staff sergeant whose bloodwork comes back a little low on testosterone next spring. Nobody’s asking him for evaluation letters from therapists. There’s no legislature holding hearings about his prescription, no lawsuit trying to stop his refills. Under Hegseth’s program, he won’t even have to ask. The Pentagon is coming to him.

So when a member of Congress looks at that program and declares it the same thing I went through the wringer for, I understand the point she thinks she’s making. But here’s the message a casual reader actually takes away: transition care belongs in the same drawer as testosterone boosters, Botox, and Elon Musk’s hair plugs. And once it’s in that drawer, it’s about as “medically necessary” as anything else in there. Which is to say: completely optional.

That phrase, medically necessary, is doing far more work than it gets credit for. It’s the standard insurers use to decide what they’ll cover and what they’ll wave off as cosmetic, and “cosmetic” is already their favorite exit ramp when a trans patient’s claim hits the desk. It’s the finding those dozens of medical organizations put their names behind. It’s the thing my three letters existed to establish in the first place. The entire miserable apparatus I climbed through exists because this care has to keep proving, over and over, to skeptical people holding checkbooks, that it’s necessary. The joke hands that hard-won word away for free.

I’m far from the first trans person to notice this. Back in January, after a publication described Karoline Leavitt’s lip filler as gender-affirming care, Woodlief McCabe wrote in Autostraddle about how insulting the comparison feels from the receiving end, and where the logic ends up if you follow it: “If everything is gender affirming care, then nothing is.” He’s right. A category that stretches to cover lip filler and hair plugs is a category insurers and legislators will be delighted to treat like lip filler and hair plugs. They’ve been trying to file us under “cosmetic” for years. The gotcha does the paperwork for them.

There’s no contradiction to catch

The assumption buried inside every one of these dunks is that Republicans oppose gender-affirming care because they think hormones are dangerous, or because they think the government shouldn’t be in the hormone business. Catch them handing out testosterone to soldiers and you’ve caught them breaking their own rule.

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