This was AI Mode, specifically, the chatbot that lives inside Google now and triggers by default when you search. The Gemini app gave TheWrap Biden, 306 to 232. Ars Technica tried AI Mode over VPNs in Taiwan, Russia, France and Canada and got straight answers, and Fast Company’s Sarah Fielding, writing from the UK, got Biden right up until she switched her VPN to the U.S., when suddenly… it wouldn’t say who won 2020.

Google’s news account replied to that 2020 screenshot on Bluesky a little after 1 p.m. ET Wednesday, allowing that this “isn’t the most helpful response on Search.” Okay, sure.

Later, a spokesperson told Ars it was a “technical gap.” By 6:35 p.m. ET, when I tried again, AI Mode was back to naming Biden. So maybe that’s all it was? But from out here, it’s really impossible to know what was a glitch vs. what was intentional, and Google is far from the only AI company where that’s the case. This is a widespread problem with AI (and the current information ecosystem, generally): no transparency.

Trump has given people plenty of reasons to assume the worst about Google

The first coverage went straight to motive. Mediaite’s story opened by wondering whether the chatbot is “gunning for a place in President Donald Trump’s administration.”

And yes, Google Maps shows U.S. users the “Gulf of America” now, and “Lake America,” too. Google says it just follows the federal place-names database, which, sure, but Trump’s the one who had the database changed. Then this month, at a rally in Kentucky: “Google wouldn’t have taken my call in the first. Now, they kiss my ass.” Four days later, in South Carolina, he said he’d called Sundar Pichai about renaming the Atlantic, and that Pichai told him, “Please don’t ask us to do that,” a call Google hasn’t confirmed.

And you also need to keep in mind that the company gave Trump $1 million for his inauguration... and YouTube gave him a $24.5 million settlement over a goofy lawsuit.

So yes, this all looks bad for the company, which has a very recent history of throwing cash at him and doing whatever he wants. But I don’t think people should necessarily jump to conclusions here. There’s clearly been some sort of change because it will now fairly reliably name Biden as the 2020 winner without having to be pushed with follow-up questions.

Still, I spent part of Wednesday afternoon testing it myself, running a few dozen queries, some signed in to my own Google account and some in a signed-out incognito window. By the evening, things seemed to be fixed. Impeached twice? Answered. Thirty-four felony counts? Answered. January 6? “A violent mob of supporters of outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump,” it said. So that’s good! It eventually got put back on the right track. Still…

Only Google knows whether it was a glitch

Did Donald Trump win the 2016 election? “Yes.” Did Hillary Clinton? “No.” Did Joe Biden win in 2020? Go look it up. Did Trump win in 2020? Same deal.

The spokesperson told Ars that AI Mode checks its answers about elections against news coverage or AP results for recent races and historical records for anything older, and that “there was a technical gap with 2020.” Google said 2022 Senate races had the same problem. (Murkowski last ran in 2022, which might explain the first screenshot.) Google didn’t respond to the questions I sent them on Wednesday.

Is that true? It might be! It would explain why “who won the 2024 election,” which came with an AP results card every time I asked, never gave it any trouble. Google didn’t address why Ars could get answers when searching through Canada and Taiwan via VPN. My best guess, reading Google’s statement, is that the part that broke was the checking, and when it couldn’t check, it punted (go look it up yourself!) instead of answering. A reasonable safety net? Maybe! Again, it’s all extremely opaque.

In 2024, the Washington Post asked Gemini who won the 2020 election, and the bot said it was still learning and told the reporter to try Google Search. Google told the Post that was deliberate. (Two years later, it’s Google Search sending people elsewhere. Cool.) Last October, AI Overviews wouldn’t touch “is Trump in cognitive decline” but answered it about Biden, and Google said its systems are “not always 100 percent consistent.”

And it’s a problem that spans the entire AI space. xAI blamed Grok’s sudden habit of bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa on an “unauthorized modification” by an employee cough Elon Musk cough cough it never named. Two months later, it blamed Grok praising Hitler on a code update. OpenAI rolled back a ChatGPT update in April 2025 that had turned it into a suck-up, and said it had “focused too much on short-term feedback.” Writing about Grok back then, I said that “we only found out because users noticed and raised alarms.”

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“That’s why I don’t use them”

Whenever one of these stories goes around, somebody in the replies says, “That’s why I don’t use them.” And that’s great! Truly! But the issue is that millions of other people are using them.

These systems are beginning to become how millions of people get their information. Google says AI Mode has more than a billion users a month. Pew says about four in ten American adults use chatbots to look things up. And when Pew watched what people actually did on Google results pages with an AI summary on them, back in March 2025, they clicked a link inside the summary about 1% of the time. For the most part, whatever the AI response says is what people are going to believe, which is not great.

One percent!

There’s no accountability for how these systems respond, and that’s a problem that needs to somehow be addressed. There’s nothing in U.S. law that would require Google to explain why AI Mode would answer 2016 and duck 2020. The FTC put out a proposal in July (still just a proposal) about AI that’s secretly designed to put something other than accuracy first, and even that says hallucinations that don’t stem from “a design decision” aren’t a problem on their own. Was this a design decision? Glitch or choice? That’s the exact thing nobody outside Google can see. (It’s also Andrew Ferguson’s FTC, Trump’s pick, in an administration that has spent the past year leaning on AI companies over what their chatbots say.)

Anyway, if you’re one of my U.S. readers, you probably know that election day is on Tuesday. I strongly recommend making a plan to vote, which I wrote about last week:

ACLU's "Make a voting plan" website

For transparency’s sake, here’s is how I’ll be voting in the major races around me here in Chicago, IL:

Here are some articles I enjoyed reading this week:

Betrayed, disappointed, hurt — and backing Democrats anyway
by Brooke Migdon, The 19th

Don’t Vote For The Worst Anti-Trans Democrats
by , Erin in the Morning

Depraved Ramaswamy ad is being normalized by news-speak
by , Press Watch

The People Who Tell the Story of Democracy
by , The Wayfinder

False Protection: Trump Fails Women in Title IX Assault Cases
by Billie Jean Sweeney, Important Context

J. K. Rowling’s Extremism Escalates in Hateful “Update” on Anti-Trans Views
by , Assigned Media

They... didn’t. The House passed it that day. Two weeks and a rewrite later, President George W. Bush signed the final bill into law on October 26, 2001, 45 days after the September 11 attacks. That makes today the law’s 25th birthday.

How did this happen? Well, people were pretty freaked out following 9/11 (members of Congress very much included), and the people in charge kept telling us this was needed to prevent another attack from happening. So the bill sailed through the Senate 98-1. Good luck getting re-elected if you vote against something called the Patriot Act just weeks after the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

In September I wrote that the government used the attacks to justify attacking our civil liberties, and this is a big part of how that happened.

I’ve also been thinking about how a lot of younger people don’t really remember a world before the Patriot Act. We just sort of accept it. So let’s review it.

The Bush administration shared a draft of the proposed bill with Congress about a week after 9/11. It went far enough that Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the Judiciary Committee chairman, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I thought the original Justice Department proposal went far too far.”

But Attorney General John Ashcroft just wanted it passed. Every day without the new powers, he told the Judiciary Committee on September 24, was “a day that terrorists have a competitive advantage.” On October 2, he went on CNN’s Larry King Live and said, “We need the tools to fight terrorism. Talk won’t prevail against terrorism. But tools can do so.” Asked whether the bill would pass, he said he believed it would. “But I have been a little bit — frankly, I have been disappointed with the pace.” His draft had been on the Hill for about two weeks.

The press was getting reminders of its own. On September 26, asked about Bill Maher’s comments on Politically Incorrect, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that Americans “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” That line was missing from the White House’s official transcript at first. The stenographers’ office later told American Journalism Review it had simply been overlooked, and the transcript was corrected. Two days later, Fleischer said he had “made some concerns known to the media, which I’ll continue to make known on a private level.” On October 16, PBS NewsHour ran a segment on the limits of dissent that included two small papers: the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Oregon, had fired its columnist Dan Guthrie, and the Texas City Sun had let go its city editor, Tom Gutting, both over columns criticizing Bush for not heading straight back to Washington on September 11.

And on October 10, after a conference call with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the five major TV news organizations agreed to edit any future Osama bin Laden tapes. The New York Times called it “the first time in memory that the networks had agreed to a joint arrangement to limit their prospective news coverage.” The Senate voted on the bill the next night.

As for the bill itself, the media watchdog FAIR found in late September that neither CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News had aired a single report “exploring the legislation’s potential impact.”

Sensenbrenner and the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), worked out a narrower bill than the White House wanted, with a two-year sunset on the new surveillance powers, and on October 3 the committee passed it 36-0. They called it the “Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act, or PATRIOT.

The Senate skipped the committee step. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) wanted to offer four amendments, including one that would let agents listen in on a roving wiretap only when the target was actually on the line, and another limiting the FBI’s new power to demand business records. “I can’t quite understand why we can’t have just a few hours of debate,” he said. The three amendments he offered were voted down on October 11, and the Senate passed its bill 96-1 that night.

“That is the best I can do”

That left the House with a bill its own committee had passed unanimously and a separate bill from the Senate. The normal thing (you know, the one from high school civics?) would’ve been for the House to pass its version and work out the differences with the Senate in a conference committee. Instead, on Friday, October 12, House Republican leadership skipped all of that and brought a substitute to the floor. So whose bill was it? It was the Senate’s. “It is the text that was introduced in the Senate by the Democratic leader of the Senate, the Senator from South Dakota (Mr. Daschle),” Sensenbrenner told the House, with some of its provisions taken out and some of the committee’s ideas put in over the previous 48 hours.

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There are two gameplay options: “Voting Mode” and “Stay At Home Mode.” In “Voting Mode,” the objective is to “cast a ballot and heal democracy.” (No pressure.) In “Stay At Home Mode,” your goal is to “eat a burrito” and “enjoy your digital apartment.” It’s a fun (and funny) way to kill some time. Check it out!

Some of the things you deal with in the voting simulator are things you might encounter in real life. Making sure you’re at the right location, making sure you’ve got whatever forms of ID you need depending on where you live, etc. And… well, there’s a lot of stuff you probably don’t have to worry about (hell demons, a nuclear bomb, a voting machine that functions as a boss fight).

And while it’s good to have a laugh (and I’ll always hype up my pals at The Onion, who do great work), the federal government (i.e., Donald Trump) has been trying to make voting harder and find ways to intimidate voters.

The midterms are less than two weeks away, so if you haven’t figured out what you’ll do if you run into one of the game’s obstacles at your real-life polling place, this weekend is a great time to make a plan.

The administration lost most of its legal fights over voting rules, so it’s leaning harder on intimidation

We all know that Donald Trump is what some might call a “sore loser.” And after his attempted autocoup in 2021 went unpunished — the federal case against him was dropped once he won in 2024 — it makes sense that he’s pushing the envelope (a bit of an understatement) when it comes to trying to tilt the midterms in his favor.

Since retaking office in January 2025, Trump has signed two executive orders on voting. Judges blocked most of the first one, from March 2025. The second tried to control how the Postal Service delivers mail ballots, and the Supreme Court made sure that rule won’t apply this November. The Department of Justice has also filed 31 lawsuits trying to get its hands on voter rolls. Thankfully, by the Brennan Center’s tally, it’s 0-for-26 in the ones judges have ruled on so far. Then there’s the SAVE America Act, which would make people show documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote. It’s stuck in the Senate.

So, yes, Trump is trying to interfere, which should be treated as a gigantic scandal in itself. But he’s hit some bumps in the road. Those bumps are good.

After a summer of court fights over Trump’s mail-ballot order, NPR summed up where things landed: “In the end, no mail voting rules have actually changed.” That hasn’t kept people from worrying. Carly Koppes is a Republican election official in Colorado’s Weld County, and she told NPR she’s been hearing from confused voters. “This is my 22nd year [running elections],” she said. “Absolutely, this is the most uncertain.”

That uncertainty didn’t come from nowhere. Asked in May whether federal agents might be sent to polling places, Trump said he’d do “anything necessary” to make sure elections are “honest.” Last month, Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, said ICE might come to a polling place to serve a warrant, and FBI Director Kash Patel wouldn’t rule out his agents showing up at the polls either, offering only that they’d “follow the law.” DHS told NPR that ICE “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” and then, in the very next line:

“ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.”

It also said, “Those who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear.”

Then there’s the Justice Department. It plans to send about 1,000 monitors to the polls this year, which Harmeet Dhillon, who runs its Civil Rights Division, called “the largest monitoring effort” DOJ has ever run (roughly three times as many monitors as it sent for the last midterm). This time, it also plans to use some criminal prosecutors, which the department used to avoid because of how that might feel to voters. The NAACP is in court trying to keep prosecutors, and law enforcement generally, out of the monitor ranks. Kiersten Pels, a DOJ spokesperson, argued that the lawsuit grew out of “unwarranted fear and baseless speculation.” She also said this, which I assume was meant to be reassuring:

“Monitors will not identify themselves as prosecutors.”

In California, the department is suing to make the state set aside the ballots of anyone on a list of about 20,000 people it calls “likely” noncitizens, and the administration has warned election officials that if they knowingly count those ballots, they “risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.” When Los Angeles County did a preliminary review of 200 names from the list, 38.9% of the people whose birthplace was “meaningfully reported” listed a U.S. one. Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general, had already conceded at a Monday press conference that the list might not be clean: “There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens, we’re not perfect,” he said. “And that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us.”

Is any of it landing? Yeah. Even before most of that, a UC San Diego poll taken Sept. 1-9 found that about 40% of Americans thought it was likely ICE agents would be at voting sites near them, and the worry that immigration agents would question them, even though they’re citizens, was much higher for people of color than for white people.

And that’s kind of the idea, right? If the administration can make voters so afraid that they’ll be harassed or intimidated by Trump goons at the polling place that they stay home, then it has accomplished its goal, no goons required.

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So make a plan

Have you ever made a voting plan before? You should! Here’s a good place to start. (If you want an even longer checklist, Ms. has a good one, which I leaned on here.)

If you’ve got a few moments this weekend, you should check your registration, find your polling place and its hours, and look up exactly what sort of ID you need to cast a ballot (VoteRiders has a state-by-state rundown).

If you’re voting by mail, consider hand-delivering your ballot to either your election office or an official drop box (if your area has them) instead of putting it in the mail. The Postal Service recommends mailing it at least a week before your state’s deadline. Most states won’t count a ballot that arrives after Election Day, whatever the postmark says, and several more have adopted that rule since the last midterms.

If you’re told by a poll worker that your ID isn’t acceptable, ask what you can do. In some states, you can sign a sworn statement and vote as you normally would. In other, stricter states, you might be allowed to cast a provisional ballot that will count if you do something like show your ID at an election office within a specific window of time. Basically, now’s the time to check to see what you need. If you don’t have an acceptable ID, VoteRiders will help you get one for free (call or text 866-432-8683).

If they can’t find your name at the polling place, ask them to double-check that you’re in the right place (in many states, a provisional ballot cast at the wrong precinct won’t count). Have them direct you to the correct location. Around 20 states and D.C. let you register and vote on Election Day itself, which can clear up this problem, too. For everyone else, you can ask for a provisional ballot. Ask what you need to do for it to count, and by when.

As for anyone at the polls who isn’t a poll worker, you don’t owe them a conversation. Some states, including Florida and Texas, bar partisan poll watchers from talking to voters at all. DOJ monitors can watch, and they can talk to you once you’re outside, Reuters reports, but they have no power to open an investigation right there or keep anybody from casting a ballot. In most states, they can’t come inside without election officials’ permission, and DOJ has agreed under administrations of both parties that its monitors will openly say they’re monitors.

An agent stopping you is a different situation. The Brennan Center’s guide for voters says to ask if you’re allowed to leave, and if they say yes, to go, calmly. You don’t have to answer their questions (in some kinds of stops, like traffic stops, you may have to identify yourself), and without a warrant, you don’t have to unlock your phone for them. It’s also against federal law for anyone, government officials included, to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce” you for voting. If you see that happening, to you or anybody else, tell the poll workers (or whoever’s in charge there), call or text Election Protection, and, if you can do it safely, write down what happened and when. Anyone in danger? Call 911.

One more thing: don’t post that ICE is at your polling place unless you know it is. Brennan warns that a false report can scare people out of voting by itself.

And if there’s still a line when your polling place closes, don’t leave it. If you got in line before closing, you get to vote.

For anything else, there’s the Election Protection hotline, run by a nonpartisan coalition, administered by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and answered by trained volunteers. Put these in your phone now:

• 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683), call or text

• 888-VE-Y-VOTA (888-839-8682) in Spanish

• 888-API-VOTE (888-274-8683) in Asian languages

• 844-YALLA-US (844-925-5287) in Arabic

It’s an eight-panel fold-out titled “Texas Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guide,” and a lot of other Texas households have gotten one since the weekend. The cover says “You are not alone.” Much of it is a plug for a real organization, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT, for short): its website, its resources, its fall tour. There’s also a panel headed “WHAT TO DO IF YOUR PARENTS DON’T SUPPORT YOU” and sections on emancipation, hormones and out-of-state care. It came from a “Texas Transgender Student Union” at 1611 W. Airport Blvd. in Meadows Place. “It isn’t a valid address, according to a USPS lookup tool,” KXAN reported.

TENT didn’t send it, the group says. “These text messages and mailers were not authored, authorized, approved, or distributed by TENT and are not affiliated with our organization,” reads the statement that’s now the only thing on its website. The texts were sent earlier this month, and also directed people to go to TENT’s site. TENT has since demanded that the people behind this be identified. The only “Texas Transgender Student Union” anyone has found is a Wyoming LLC set up on September 2. Its filing names an organizer and no owner. Both Ken Paxton’s and James Talarico’s Senate campaigns told CBS News Texas they weren’t involved. Early voting started October 19.

Nobody knows who sent it. Okay. What I find interesting is how quickly a lot of the people most outraged about receiving these mailers stopped caring who sent it and started pushing the line that whoever mailed it, this is what trans groups are all about, and isn’t that terrible. If that’s the argument, the mailer is a success (assuming that “success” means sparking anti-trans outrage) no matter who gets caught. And the advice to kids they were angriest about isn’t in TENT’s toolkit or on its website.

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The next morning, on CNN’s State of the Union, host Dana Bash played the clip for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI). “So he said, ‘Yes, sure,’” Bash began. Rogers started talking about the streamer Hasan Piker (as he has been doing throughout the campaign), then got to the video:

ROGERS: He didn’t disavow it. He goes on this word salad trying to get around the fact that he can’t do it.

BASH: He said — he did — he did say — he said, “Sure, yes.”

ROGERS: No, that’s not true. Dana, listen...

Bash pushed back, saying, “I want to be factual. He said, ‘Yes, sure,’” but Rogers kept going: “He didn’t disavow it. He didn’t say no. He didn’t say it worries me that they treat women differently under the Muslim Brotherhood’s view of Sharia law. He didn’t say any of that. He didn’t because he won’t and he can’t.” That night, the Rogers campaign put “won’t and can’t” in the headline of a press release: “MIKE ROGERS ON CNN: ABDUL WON’T AND CAN’T DISAVOW THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD.”

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Weird, right? If you, like me, weren’t swimming in the right-wing fever swamp that is X last week, you might be a bit confused about what this is all about. Here’s the short version of the story:

Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, was off the campaign trail for nine days after saying during an event for the Hispanic Business Council (via video) that he’d been diagnosed with the flu after feeling under the weather for a few days. Pretty bad timing to have to pause campaigning with the election coming up in just a few weeks, but stuff like this happens, and isn’t super out of the ordinary.

But in Talarico’s case, Republicans wouldn’t take his word for it, and instead insisted that something nefarious was going on. For days, they’d been floating baseless conspiracy theories ranging from a silly claim that Talarico is secretly transgender and was off the campaign trail to recover from bottom surgery (setting aside the fact that he’s not trans, as someone currently recovering from that surgery, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that he absolutely would not be able to campaign just nine days after surgery — I write this from my bed more than a month out from my own) to a claim that he’d been admitted to a mental health facility.

In any case, he was, in fact, at home between October 1 and October 8, presumably recovering from the flu. The New York Times reviewed time-stamped images from his home security camera. PolitiFact rated the mental hospital claim “Pants on Fire.”

By Monday, October 12, mainstream media outlets were all over the story about the conspiracy theories, declaring that they had backfired on the people spreading them. CNN’s Aaron Blake called it “the latest to blow up in MAGA’s face.” The Nation went with “Elon Musk’s James Talarico Smear Blew Up In His Face.” NBC News: “Republican attempts to trip up James Talarico keep backfiring.”

But... did this backfire? Or did it serve its purpose in the current information environment? I think it’s too early to say that this was a net negative for the conspiracy theorists and Republican operatives pushing it. I don’t think the people spreading the rumors cared whether or not they were true. I think they just wanted to spread a lie that people could believe. Yes, these were lies. Yes, the people spreading the lies knew they were spreading something baseless. But because enough big names were spreading it, major media outlets needed to cover it, even if just to debunk it. To no one’s surprise, one of the people spreading the rumors was Elon Musk, owner of X, the richest person in the world, and the top Republican donor. That’s a problem.

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Donald Trump Jr. had a theory about why. “ABC deleted this article in less than 24 hours because it’s false,” he wrote on X, responding to Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who had shared it. “Sounds about as long as your presidential campaign would last.” Sinclair’s national desk turned the deletion into a story of its own, and you can still read it on WJLA, Sinclair’s ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., under the headline “ABC deletes report on Trump sons’ investment ties to companies with $6B in DOD contracts.” Nobody’s touched it since Thursday afternoon.

And while it’s true that the story was taken down (and we’ll get to that in a moment), it’s since been republished. There’s a new headline, the reporter’s name is gone from the byline, and there’s a vaguely worded correction at the top of the article that doesn’t exactly explain what was wrong with the original. So what happened?

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“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.