As the ruling landed, though, I found myself with a lot of thoughts. Some about my days with Nexstar’s NewsNation, which I spoke with Slate’s Nitish Pahwa who covered the story today here, some as far back as the activism of my youth.

I’ll start with the activism of my youth: Galesburg, Illinois wasn’t the only town where this happened, but in the 90s, MTV was relatively controversial, and a few people in charge decided to listen to the voices that didn’t want to hear it. They pulled MTV off air locally. Too provocative. Too loud. Too much. I remember starting a petition, getting signatures, and in one rare moment of family political unity, even my brothers signed on.

I faxed in the petition (yes, I’m aging myself). I’m sure it wasn’t a result of my petition, but they did eventually bring it back. I just remember how much it angered me that a few voices could control what we all watched. Gatekeepers deciding what we needed to know.

That instinct has never left me.

And it’s exactly what’s at stake now, except the gatekeepers aren’t local officials responding to a handful of complaints. They’re billion-dollar media companies with political relationships to protect.

A Free Press Is the Thing That Holds Everyone Accountable

I launched a journalism partnership with the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom last Thursday alongside longtime conservative columnist Jay Nordlinger. In our first conversation, we kept coming back to the state of the press. A lived crisis we’ve both seen from different angles.

Eight years in the Obama campaign and White House taught me that a free and fair press is the one thing that holds everyone accountable. Politicians don’t like hard questions. But a good reporter doesn’t accept no comment, and neither should a functioning democracy.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, he promised no interference. We’ve watched that promise erode. An editorial page increasingly friendly to the current administration, layoffs gutting international desks at a moment when disinformation in conflict zones is more dangerous than ever. They’ve framed these decisions as business decisions. What they’ve actually made is a values decisions.

That’s the lens I bring to the Nexstar debate. And that’s also why media consolidation, such as it is, matters so much to our ideas of freedom.

I Used to Be One of Their Loudest Cheerleaders

Nexstar owns NewsNation, its national cable news network.

My first real experience with them was election night 2022, when a network executive asked me to join their coverage for nine hours. We called it straight on candidates from both parties. I was honest in ways I hadn’t always been able to be on television, and they didn’t stop me. Network executives were thrilled. They said they wanted me as a contributor. I believed I had found a place where I could tell the truth without retribution.

It didn’t last.

As we approached 2024, I felt the pressure shifting. The network seemed increasingly interested in positioning itself favorably with a potential Trump administration.

I lost my love for the network the night they hosted the last Republican debate without Trump. Chris Cuomo ran the pre and post show. The “Democrat” for the night was Geraldo Rivera. The only thing liberal I knew about Geraldo was the number of wives he had.

I found myself in a trailer with Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s former acting chief of staff, and Larry Hogan, a popular Republican Governor of a Democratic state, all of us off air at the time, three people with real political experience who truly cared, watching peacocks fluff their feathers for the camera, performing without substance.

I grew angry thinking about how hard I’d cheer-led for something becoming exactly what I hated. I wanted the real conversations with people who could call out all sides, from all sides, especially at critical moments. I was all too honest with network executives who knew I was angry. I made no attempts to conceal it.

It wasn’t long before I was on a panel where Jason Miller, a Trump aide, appeared. He has been forced to admit to hiring women for sex and lying to his wife. He impregnated a rising Latino Republican and somehow she lost her role in the Trump orbit, but he didn’t. He had proven, over and over, that he would lie. I had no reason to trust anything he said, and I said so, on air.

Network leadership was ticked. I got lit into in the hallway by the producer. I wasn’t allowed to criticize a guest, I was told. I’m quite sure that rule would not have applied if the guest had been Hunter Biden.

I was on less after that. When my agent called to say they’d opted to end my contract, I was fine. They had told me who they were. I hadn’t changed. But my trust in their marketing was rocked, this wasn’t news for all Americans, especially if we were expected to conceal the truth about a guest who had a documented history of lies.

What the Ruling Means, and What It Doesn’t

On Friday U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy Nunley found that eight Democratic state attorneys general and DirecTV are likely to prevail on antitrust claims. That the merger would reduce competition, raise consumer costs, and weaken local journalism. Blocking it, he wrote, is in the public interest.

Nexstar will appeal. Trump publicly endorsed the deal, and his FCC chairman greenlit it weeks later. The administration’s fingerprints are all over this. But the ruling matters because the judge named what critics have been saying for months. Unchecked consolidation reduces competition, weakens local news, and costs communities something that can’t be easily replaced.

What we’ll be left with, if this continues, is a more ideologically managed version of local news, calibrated for access and political relationship, not public service. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s what I watched happen in real time at a network I once believed in.

Trust in institutions is at a historic low. The business model for reliable journalism is broken. Those two facts together are my biggest fear for this country.

While independent voices are finding audiences, and honest brokers are building new platforms, I still fear that what’s disappearing is real investigative journalism. The kind of journalism I know we need requires resources, time, and the courage to make powerful people (all powerful people regardless of party) uncomfortable. We cannot afford to lose it, and with these mergers that’s exactly what’s under threat.

***

One note: I’m expecting a baby boy any day now. I’ll send an update through the column when he arrives, and I’ll be stepping back briefly to be present with my family.

The last time my husband and I welcomed a child, I was immediately back at work. So much so I was in Afghanistan 7 weeks after I delivered my son in 2012. Looking back, I missed some of the earliest days of my son’s life and I don’t want to miss them this time. I so appreciate the community we’ve built and I am so grateful for your understanding. Please feel free to write and stay in touch. I will certainly write back as time allows.

Turns out, the FBI didn’t have to release a thing.

After a series of stories detailing unwanted sexual advances on staffers and young women, and an allegation of rape, Swalwell is out of the race. I’m frankly happy he’s out. I hope he takes the issues raised seriously. This weekend he filmed a video where he denied allegations.

The Swalwell story had me thinking deeply again about the kinds of people who run for office. And about the people in political circles, in both parties, who know things and just don’t say them.

One of the biggest issues we have in American politics right now is candidates themselves. The best among us don’t seem to be those running for office or driving changes we need or solutions. Time and again we are seeing flawed and troubling candidates seeking office. It’s corrosive.

There are longstanding rumors all over Washington. Blackmailable offenses. Open secrets. The rumors about the way Katie Porter, another California gubernatorial candidate, treats her staff are well-documented in those circles.

One of Swalwell’s earliest and most prominent endorsers was Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, one of Swalwell’s closest friends in Congress. Gallego publicly defended Swalwell on social media even after initial misconduct rumors emerged, writing “when you are in first place, is when they target you.” He ultimately retracted his endorsement when the reporting became impossible to ignore.

Gallego is himself being floated as a 2028 presidential contender, a man who walked out on his pregnant wife. Worth keeping in mind.

We don’t even need to wait a day between these types of scandals. Moments after Swalwell made his resignation announcement, Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales announced he was resigning, after previously admitting an affair with a staffer who died by suicide. He bailed with a House Ethics investigation pending.

All of it raises the same question. Why do we keep ending up here?

The Politics of the Jaded

I remember when politics felt like the most important thing in the world. I was in college during the 2000 Presidential contest, a student at the University of Kansas and I drove to Kansas City to see Al Gore on the trail, just to shake his hand. Still a student in 2004, I watched closely as John Kerry took the nomination, and as a loyal Democrat I rooted for him.

John Edwards was Kerry’s running mate. The man everyone said had the brightest future in Democratic politics. Edwards later proved them right about his ambition and wrong about everything else, conducting an affair with a campaign videographer while his wife battled terminal cancer, fathering a child he denied for years.

I dodged a bullet, never working for him. I threw myself into a gubernatorial office in Kansas, a gubernatorial campaign in Iowa, and then into Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

I’ll be honest: President Obama never let me down. Whether I agreed with every decision the administration made, he was a good leader. He asked hard questions. He openly admitted he wasn’t perfect, neither were any of us, but challenged us to do better. Working directly with him, I came away proud.

Despite my enthusiasm for the President, I got jaded in Washington, maybe even before I even arrived in Washington, because so many people in politics are not there for the greater good. They’re there for themselves. The profession attracts the power-hungry and the petty in alarming numbers.

I still remember overhearing a conversation between a bag man and an advance staffer—the people whose job is literally to carry things for the candidate—talking about how they were going to “rule the world.” I thought, thank God neither of you will be ruling anything.

These days I watch a President who compares himself to Christ and picks fights with the Pope. A man whose history with Jeffrey Epstein, multiple accusers, and credibly documented misconduct requires its own archive.

President Trump is not an anomaly. He is the logical endpoint or the avatar of a culture that has decided winning is the only thing that matters.

A Revival Still Needed

This past Sunday, a friend hosted a small gathering to celebrate the coming of my second son. We’re in the final weeks now. Over the course of the afternoon, as these things go, the conversation turned to politics.

There was real frustration in the room about the candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles, the candidates for Governor of California, the options ahead.

And I’ll be honest. For those races, it’s too late. The slate is set. I hope whoever wins surprises us with their competence (I try to keep an open mind). I hope they deal seriously with California’s budget crisis, maintain the quality of public services people depend on, and haven’t been credibly accused of assaulting their staff. Somehow that last part still feels like a high bar.

We can do better. The question is whether we’re willing to.

When I left the White House I was exhausted and more cynical, ready to step back from a world increasingly dominated by people who wanted power for its own sake (a lot of them men, though not all). What I eventually realized is if everyone who finds that exhausting backs down, we’re left with only the power-hungry. The field doesn’t empty. It just fills with worse and worse people.

I know the network exists. People who want to do this right, who volunteer on their PTAs, who show up for their communities, who aren’t in it for themselves. I know money in politics creates structural barriers that are real and need changing. But the recruiting can start now. The connecting of dots can start now. In some places, I know it already has.

It is so frustrating to see yet more stories of candidate transgressions. One thing I will say, though, is that it does seem reassuring that we’re in a moment where it seems we’re very ready to throw out the bums.

The next step in solving this problem is making sure there are non-bums ready to take their place.

Quick announcement: This Thursday April 16, 3 PM Pacific / 5 PM Central, I’ll be joining fellow Substacker and , the new Substack by the Freedom Center at the University of Arizona, to kick off a series of conversations on freedom. Please join us if you can, right here on Substack.

At a press conference on Monday, President Trump declared an operation to save a servicemember who ejected from his aircraft and hid in the Iranian mountains as “straight out of central casting.” High stakes, impossible odds, a happy ending. The kind of scene that makes one tear up.

He wasn’t wrong. It was a harrowing mission. I felt it—I was raised to—and I’m sure a lot of Americans of both parties did, too.

My grandfather was a Colonel in the Air Force. When we visited him in Wichita, he took us on base. He tried to instill what excellence looks like, what service costs, and why it matters. I was routinely impressed by the bravery of our servicemen and women in missions near and far when I had the privilege of working in the White House.

The US military is extraordinary. This weekend proved it again. They executed their mission. The question isn’t military might; it’s leadership. I couldn’t get through that press conference without thinking: if we’re doing central casting, I want a different script.

Nobody Knows How This Ends

Anyone who tells you they know how this will end is bluffing. And each onramp toward the end of the conflict seems to end with President Trump upping the rhetoric.

The President says he isn’t sharing all the details. Maybe there’s a play here he’s planning that’s hard to see. Maybe, against serious odds, this ends with Iranian leadership that doesn’t chant “Death To America,” or hang its own people in the street.

I wish for that fairy tale. Across two presidential terms, though, I’m well past the point of believing that President Trump has mystical powers for subterfuge. More often than not, what you see is what you get. I don’t know how the current script gets us to that fairy tale ending of new and positive leadership in Iran (as it would seem a frustration with the US bombs will only grow discontent).

What I do know is that the President is threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone age.

Just this morning, he suggested that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” I know we’ve become inured to this rhetoric by this point, but no President in US history would speak or communicate this way, even if it is a bluff.

I listened to one Iranian woman say she wanted the President to know Iran is already living in the stone age. She doesn’t know how his actions right now gain women freedom. I’ve wondered about that myself, the whole of this war.

But as we all wonder what’s ahead, the costs of this war are adding up. And the destruction only asks for more patience and sacrifice on behalf of the American people, most of them tired of war long before this started.

The Tab That Keeps Running Up

Trump ran on no new foreign wars. Every tweet, bombing raid and escalation is a failed campaign promise, which is likely why his once allies are now calling to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip power from him. Who knew I would be listening to Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens, but then… Things are getting weird.

President Trump won this past election, in part, because Americans were angry with the US’s heavy involvement in Ukraine against Russia and in Israel against Hamas. Today, he’s presiding over a military campaign that makes both pale in comparison.

Americans were against wars that kept adding up while we ignored necessary investments in the US. And now we are in a war of choice with Iran, with a debt clock that has surged on this President’s watch, a proposed defense budget of $1.5 trillion, and cuts to the domestic programs that are supposed to hold communities together while the goal seems to be to project power abroad.

The Movie I Actually Want to See

In my hometown, patriotism is baked into our essence. People will root for the US military, because many are military families. They know the sacrifice in a way many on TV only pretend to. And they have been asked, again and again, to bear the costs of these entanglements, in a way those writing the script rarely do.

So when President Trump started talking about central casting I started thinking about the script I would want for them.

One where the core of this country isn’t rotting beneath a beautiful facade, distracted by a foreign war. Where we don’t turn against one another. Where we’re manufacturing our necessities here. Where good jobs and good wages keep families feeling full. Where our healthcare and retirement benefits are secure. Where we’re making structural investments in the next generation: education, opportunity, the conditions that produce brilliant Americans who solve hard problems and expand our reach around the world.

But instead our toll and our debts are piling up for bombs. This script leaves massive debt that our children will inherit, for bombs that we don’t quite know yet how they’ll explode.

The state is choosing the leader of the world’s fourth largest economy, in a race that could, if Democrats don’t consolidate, end with a Republican representing a majority Democratic state in Sacramento.

It’s a crowded race to say the least. The field of candidates stretches three pages on the Secretary of State’s certified list, though few candidates are truly viable.

Because there are so many Democrats and only 2 prominent Republicans, some polls show the two finalists from the June 2 jungle primary could both be Republicans. That would leave California voters in November with no Democrat on the ballot for the top slot at all.

One would think then there would be reason for organized, robust, fair debates to help voters consolidate around choices. What we got last week was a hasty cancellation of a USC hosted debate and more questions than answers.

A Field That Won’t Consolidate

Not long after the California Democratic Party suggested lower-polling candidates drop out to consolidate the field, I attended a party with well-connected political consultants and staffers.

I spoke with various folks working for campaigns, none on the record. All were enthusiastic about their candidates. When I raised the consolidation question, every answer was essentially the same: Won’t be us dropping out.

The irony is that the most qualified candidate — one who had already earned endorsements and would have made history as California’s first female governor — was among the first to leave the race. Eleni Kounalakis served as Lt. Governor under Gavin Newsom, as President Obama’s Ambassador to Hungary, and built a business her immigrant father moved to California to grow.

I’ve met her. I like her. I still don’t know why she dropped out. Toni Atkins, another high quality female candidate, dropped out early as well.

Kamala Harris, who likely would have won had she entered, declined to run. Senator Alex Padilla bowed out as well.

California is a uniquely powerful state, which is why it’s so surprising so many bowed out to run it.

I tried to go back and forth with Congressman Ro Khanna, who I admire, on X, encouraging him to go for the job. He declined publicly (and politely), saying he was focused on making a difference at the federal level, and subsequently endorsed Tom Steyer.

What remains is a field still too crowded to be coherent.

Congressman Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who served on Trump’s impeachment team, leads in several recent polls and is running on a platform of resisting the Trump administration. He’s the one the Polymarket is betting on though I’m not so sure I would make that bet quite yet. Swalwell is in a legal standoff with the FBI over the potential release of decade-old files from the Christine ‘Fang Fang’ investigation, a suspected Chinese spy who reportedly honey-trapped the Congressman and other US officials.

Katie Porter, despite her dropping poll numbers, remains in the race with a very similar anti-Trump message. She famously had her white boards in Congress, and certainly has her confidence in the race.

Tom Steyer, the billionaire activist, is running on a working-class platform, promising to tax fellow billionaires, build new housing, and and takes firm positions on issues ranging from youth access to social media to supporting single-payer health care and AI regulation. He’s got momentum and endorsements.

One recent poll actually had Tom Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton as the top two finishers. Hilton, a former Fox News host, is an immigrant from Britain and former adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron. Both Steyer and Hilton are said to have the highest net worth. Steyer, highest by a long shot, grew his wealth through the management of a hedge fund while Hilton grew his wealth in political technology, business, and most notably his wife’s prominent tech career.

What would it say about California if the top two candidates happen to hold the top two incomes in the race? Maybe a lot, but probably not the message it wants to send to the world.

The Debate That Wasn’t

The USC debate cancellation was swift. The controversy: their methodology for determining who made the debate stage appeared to weigh heavily in favor of white candidates over candidates of color.

Most notably San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a recent newcomer polling in the single digits, was invited because an advantage was built in for candidates who entered the race late. Some of his advisors have longtime USC ties.

Mahan made the cut over Xavier Becerra, who served as California’s Attorney General and then as Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. He also made it over Betty Yee, the former State Controller and the only remaining woman of color, who has made fiscal accountability key to her campaign. And Tony Thurmond, the current schools superintendent. And Antonio Villaraigosa, the former LA Mayor who came in third when he ran against Newsom in 2018 and who many serious Democrats in this state still admire.

Many were saying they deserved a chance to debate, especially this early. Despite lobbying, they wouldn’t get the chance. The debate was cancelled, and there was some irony.

On Sunday, Swalwell posted on X suggesting USC allow more candidates into its debate, writing that “debates are a fundamental part of our democratic process.” That same weekend, he declined an invitation to a forum at Fresno State on April 1, hosted by the Maddy Institute and 30 agricultural organizations, citing a scheduling conflict.

Steyer also cited a scheduling conflict with the April 1 event, though he had at the last minute tried to organize a forum in LA to replace the USC debate. Unfortunately the candidates who were lobbying to join the USC debate cited scheduling conflicts in why they couldn’t join Steyer. So many scheduling conflicts.

A Nexstar-hosted televised debate is scheduled for April 22, airing statewide across six California markets — Nexstar being the company that spent months courting the Trump administration to win approval for a $6.2 billion merger, a deal California’s own attorney general is now suing to block. Four of the five invited candidates have confirmed (Steyer, Swalwell, Hilton and Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco). The exception is Katie Porter.

Who Steps Up?

What’s particularly frustrating for California voters is that we live in a low-information state when it comes to our own elections. I can talk to many otherwise well-informed people and they don’t know who is running, what they stand for and what differentiates them.

There is limited organized coverage of this many candidates and their actual policies. (And we’ve seen this before in early presidential primaries, when dozens of candidates flood the field.) On top of that, the organizations that have scheduled debates have proactively compromised at the national level with the Trump administration to win recent approvals.

One of the organizations focusing on the race most closely has been CBS News California Investigates, the reporting initiative at what is now Paramount Skydance’s owned-and-operated station in Sacramento. They also have a scheduled debate on April 28 with Pomona College in what could be the most consequential debate of the cycle, just five days before ballots go out.

While it’s CBS local, their parent company settled a Trump lawsuit for $16 million to win federal merger approval and has certainly been under scrutiny for journalistic integrity. The candidate list for that debate has not yet been finalized.

Julie Watts, a veteran CBS California journalist and CBS News California Investigates correspondent, will be involved in the debate. It was Watts who sat down with Katie Porter and asked what she’d say to the 40 percent of California voters who voted for Trump. Porter shot back, “How would I need them in order to win?”

Porter went on to say she expected to win all non-Trump voters if she faced a Republican, and that she didn’t intend to face a Democrat at all (If she got in the final two she might get her chance). When Watts pressed her, Porter said the interview was getting unnecessarily argumentative and announced she was calling it. The clip went viral, Porter’s poll numbers fell, and the race reshuffled. That is what serious journalism and organized debate can do.

Governor Newsom has not endorsed. No other major institution has stepped up to fill the debate vacuum.

National Democrats should pay heed, too. What kind of message would it send if a state so deeply associated with opposition to President Trump doesn’t have a Democrat on the November ballot?

Mail-in voting begins May 4.

That is five weeks away. The voters of this state, and the future of its governance, deserve better than what we’ve seen so far. The question is whether anyone in a position to lead is going to actually do it in the limited time we have left. One would hope in this great Golden State that some might.

In California, our kids grow up learning about Cesar Chavez, the fight for farm workers’ rights, the movement that grew from a single idea into a national symbol. I read The New York Times’ extensive investigation on Wednesday morning as soon as it was published. I couldn’t sleep after I read it.

I’ve never believed any person is perfect. I’ve spent decades in politics and seen the flaws of great leaders and weak ones alike. But this story did something different. It took something long celebrated as a triumphant movement and revealed the darker truth underneath.

It made me think about early in the first Trump administration, when I attended an event at Rob Reiner’s home, may his soul rest in peace. He joked something along the lines, “No one in your administration grabbed them by the pussy.” I was holding a wine glass. I’m still surprised it didn’t crack from the grip, tightening with frustration. That we could be so naïve, that we could believe sexism, abuse, and worse only happened on one side of the aisle.

For those decades I’ve worked in politics and I’ve learned up close that there are good and bad on both sides of the aisle. And for the powerful, regardless of party, there has always seemed to be a different set of rules.

A Movement Built on a Secret

When I woke Wednesday night, tossing and turning — now myself eight months pregnant, cycling between the stories I’d read and dreams I couldn’t shake — I kept thinking about Dolores Huerta.

Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers alongside Chavez. For sixty years, she kept a secret. She told the Times that Chavez pressured her into sex and, in a second encounter, raped her. Both encounters led to pregnancies she hid, children she arranged to be raised by other families, because she believed that exposing the truth would destroy the farmworker movement she had spent her life building.

The Times investigation also revealed that two other women said Chavez began sexually abusing them when they were 12 and 13 years old. Barely teens. Girls around my son’s age. It sickened me.

I kept thinking about a friend of mine: a strong, justice-oriented woman, the granddaughter of the famed civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, and what it must feel like to learn something this devastating about a man whose legacy she’s carried. To stand for women’s rights, equal rights, justice and then discover this, or live through it becoming public.

Huerta herself described Chavez in The Times as “It’s kind of like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation I think.” I cannot imagine she’s the only one who felt it.

I cannot fathom disguising a pregnancy, giving birth, and placing your child in the hands of others to conceal the truth for another, someone who was supposed to be your partner. But I also cannot imagine believing that the fight for so many people’s freedom is so fragile that the whole movement would fall if its leader were exposed. That your secret if told could cause so much more struggle. When the cause feels that enormous, what decision do you make?

The Lion and the Predator

When the MeToo movement erupted, I remember thinking that there’s a thin line between a dog and a predator. I heard at the time that some of the accused had taken polygraph tests on whether they had raped the women who accused them. They passed. I wasn’t surprised. I honestly don’t think they believed it was rape. They thought everyone loved them.

MeToo only started a conversation we are still having. With the Epstein files, with decades of abuse by people who were supposed to be pious, whether the Catholic Church, or Presidents, or civil rights icons, it all connects.

The thing is, we have long had an imbalance of power, and that imbalance is genderless, really it’s amorphous. Whether it’s a young boy who is powerless and abused, or a woman perceived as powerful who feels she cannot speak because she is beholden to someone else’s legacy to make progress, the people at the bottom of that imbalance are rarely entirely free to make their own choices.

That is the deeper story underneath the Chavez headlines. And it is not unique to him.

Abuse of Power Has No Party, No Race, No Religion

I remember sitting at a dinner in DC with a group of conservative women, insiders from the first Trump administration. We were talking about the imbalance of power — I said how wrong it was that abuse happened, a political scandal of a President (Clinton) bore the name of a young woman (Lewinsky), and so many were willing to look the other way. They looked at me and said: “It’s happening again.” Everyone in their world is aware of indiscretions in their own ranks, but unable or unwilling to tarnish the legacy of a leader for fear that their objectives would not be achieved.

Is that how progress gets made, by burying indiscretions in real time?

This is not a partisan problem. It is not a problem of one race, one religion, one movement, one party. We have seen it in the Catholic Church and in the labor movement. We have seen it in Hollywood and in Washington. We have seen it from the left and the right, from the pious and the secular, from the celebrated and the obscure. The Epstein files touch figures across every ideological spectrum.

There are outstanding accusations against people in this current administration: Pete Hegseth, whose own mother’s anger came to light ahead of his confirmation hearing. Donald Trump, who Elon Musk posted would be named in the sealed Epstein files — and Musk’s own name has since surfaced in those same documents.

I know there are people who could tell the truth. I know of credible accusations involving people in previous administrations too.

The Chavez story forces us to hold two things at once. First, that a movement genuinely improved the lives of farm workers, and second that a man who led that movement used his power to violate the most vulnerable around him. That reckoning is not comfortable.

We need to learn that when we lionize an individual rather than a cause, we hand that individual enormous power to abuse; and we make the people around him or her feel that their silence is the price of the movement’s survival. That power creates an unhealthy imbalance.

Sunlight Is the Only Disinfectant

I was genuinely impressed by how swiftly the United Farm Workers acted publicly, though I imagine that behind the scenes, it was not swift at all. Stories like this are a long time coming as a general rule, and The Times had been working on this story for five years which is an exceptionally long time and shows a significant amount of diligence.

When faced with the imminent publication, the UFW removed themselves from Cesar Chavez Day celebrations. Family members did not deny the accusations; they said they had trouble reconciling them. The institution moved.

So what do we think we gain by staying silent? Is a movement only as strong as its leading lion, even when the lion is also a predator?

If we truly want to reconcile the imbalance of power, we have to remove the shroud of secrecy. We have to hold people accountable, regardless of which side of the aisle they stand on, which community they come from, which cause they champion. And perhaps we should stop lionizing individuals in the first place. In my experience, we are all capable of great sins.

As much as I tossed and turned thinking about the stories of suffering I read last week, I am glad people are telling them. I only wish more would. Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. And justice — for all of us and for the next generation — can only begin with the truth.

One thing I have learned in politics is the actual story doesn’t matter as much as the one people think they know.

That’s certainly the case with the currently defunded Department of Homeland Security. The story the Trump administration keeps telling is that Democrats shut down the critical department.

That’s not, strictly speaking, true. It’s just the one people believe, and without more accurate reporting, continues to be with limited nuance. This morning the only news that emerged is the Democrats sent a counterproposal that the White House reviewed.

In reality, Democrats put forward bills to fund every part of the Department of Homeland Security except ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Senate Republicans blocked them all. Five separate times in a single day.

Democrats were ready to fund the Transportation Security Administration, which screens you at the airport. They were ready to fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds when disaster hits. And the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which guards our digital infrastructure. And the Coast Guard.

All of it, Democrats wanted to fund individually. All of it got voted down.

The core of Democrats’ demand isn’t complicated: They want immigration agents to stop wearing masks, carry body cameras, and use warrants before entering homes. These are the same standards applied to every other federal law enforcement agency in the country.

Republicans in Congress refused to vote on individual funding bills to fund the bulk of the agency, or lead the discussion with the Democrats on compromise, deferring to the White House.

And so now, about 3 weeks into a war with Iran, we are still without a functioning Department of Homeland Security.

Many Americans would never know Democrats made funding offers at all.

Democrats Have Something Bigger Than A Messaging Problem

If you open social media any morning you’ll see Republican influencers, politicians, and commentators—from wildly different backgrounds—all amplifying the exact same story.

The message discipline is honestly impressive. By the time most Americans encounter the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, the Republican frame has already been set: Democrats shut it down.

The counter-story gets almost no oxygen. And Democrats are once again the ones gasping for air. They’re failing to tell their own story, at a moment when the story is actually on their side.

This isn’t just a messaging problem.

There are real issues with freedom of the press that deserve attention. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth effectively gutted the Pentagon press corps last fall, requiring journalists to sign a pledge that all Defense Department information must be approved for public release before being reported, even if unclassified. Nearly every major news organization refused and surrendered their credentials. The reporters who replaced them include Laura Loomer and James O’Keefe. This is not a press corps. These are right-wing influencers with badges.

This weekend, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested he would revoke broadcasters’ licenses over Iran war coverage, warning that those running what the administration believes is fake news must “correct course before their license renewals come up.” President Trump said he was thrilled by the move.

Then there is Tucker Carlson, a previous ally of the President, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration’s Iran war. He claimed this weekend, without providing any evidence, that the CIA is preparing a criminal referral to the Justice Department, accusing him of acting as a foreign agent. The irony is thick: Attorney General Pam Bondi was previously registered as a foreign agent for the government of Qatar. In one of her first acts as AG, she issued a directive limiting criminal enforcement of the very foreign agent law under which Carlson claims he is being targeted.

Press freedom is under assault. The machinery for silencing dissent is already being built. And it is the environment in which Democrats must get their message out.

Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene declared on CNN yesterday that Trump has turned MAGA into a “perverted, deranged version” of itself by waging an unprovoked foreign war. Republican cracks are showing. But while all of that gets coverage, the Democrats’ attempt to reopen the Department of Homeland Security is getting next to none.

If any counter-narrative is going to reach the American people, Democrats are going to have to stop behaving like cats, get on the same page, and work towards a new communications strategy.

Could One Small Bill at a Time Be the Answer to a Broken Congress?

The Department of Homeland Security shutdown raises a question worth asking honestly: Does everything have to come in one massive bill?

For nearly two centuries, Congress passed the federal budget as 12 separate appropriations bills, one for each area of government spending. That practice held until 1982. Since then, bills have grown longer and longer, enacted in fewer and fewer packages. What was once careful, line-by-line accountability has become a take-it-or-leave-it exercise that almost no one fully reads.

Democrats have done it. Republicans have done it. The logic is always the same: bundle everything together and you hold your caucus in line.

Democrats jammed through enormous packages under President Biden that frustrated even their own base. The Inflation Reduction Act dropped the expanded Child Tax Credit that had been sending monthly deposits directly into families' bank accounts — which cut child poverty in half — while keeping funding for wind energy.

Republicans passed what they called the One Big Beautiful Bill last year, a sprawling piece of legislation that many members admitted they never fully read. It included provisions cutting the tax deduction for charitable and church donations, a strange choice for a party that has long argued churches and charities, not government, should solve social problems.

What if Republicans who care about child poverty could vote on just the Child Tax Credit? And what if Democrats who care about charitable giving could vote just on that? Could we break this terrible cycle?

Ironically, on the Department of Homeland Security funding, that’s exactly what Democrats are already proposing: smaller bills. Pass funding for the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency now, while continuing to negotiate on immigration enforcement.

It’s transparent, accountable and common sense.

And yet I’m not hearing much about it. I think that’s a problem.

She fell, fired by President Trump last week, the first Cabinet secretary shown the door in his second term. It’s amazing it took this long given her questionable decisions, even more so that she’s been given a soft landing as a Special Envoy to something called the “Shield of America,” a role still within government, with a salary yet to be disclosed.

The last hearing seemed to call for a reckoning. So she was fired. But I don’t think it’s time for her political obituary. We’ve seen the comings and goings of some in politics who rise questionably and fall fast to fade.

But Noem hasn’t left yet. She’s still in the building, literally, until March 31. And the department she ran — the third largest in the federal government with around 260,000 employees — is currently closed, unable to get funded, while the people actually guarding our borders, patrolling our coasts, staffing our airports aren’t getting paid.

The political obituary can wait. The accountability shouldn’t.

The Numbers We Should Be Discussing

Here is what happened to DHS’s budget under Noem’s watch, and almost none of it has been properly examined.

In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, handing DHS more than $170 billion — the largest supplemental appropriation in the department’s history — with, as the Congressional Research Service noted, “limited specificity as to how the funding was to be divided.” Republicans handed over the money and trusted leadership to sort it out.

ICE’s budget tripled, from roughly $10 billion to nearly $29 billion. Meanwhile, FEMA was cut. CISA, the agency protecting American infrastructure from cyberattack, lost a third of its workforce. Noem proposed slashing intelligence analysts from 1,000 to 275. And she reportedly required her personal sign-off on every funding obligation over $100,000, creating backlogs in disaster relief programs.

She centralized the money, hobbled oversight, and gave the border the cameras. Everything else got cut.

Well, not the ad budget. On February 13, 2025 — nineteen days after she was sworn in — DHS awarded two no-bid contracts: $143 million to Safe America Media, and $77 million to People Who Think. Safe America then subcontracted to the Strategy Group, run by Benjamin Yoho, Noem’s 2022 campaign manager, whose wife was Noem’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs — the office that issued the contracts.

When Noem said Trump approved the ad campaign, he reportedly called allies and said he hadn’t. And while she’s out, questions about that spending linger, as does the priorities set forth.

Loyalty and Its Discontents

I saw a tweet recently by Pamela Hensley — a MAGA influencer with 217,000 followers — who argued that Gavin Newsom can’t be trusted in office because he once betrayed his marriage vows. “A man who betrays his faith and his marriage lacks the character to lead.”

I’ve had some questions about that for some time, so I replied: “Agree. Now apply the same theory to the current President and his Cabinet. Who’s left?”

JD Vance, maybe. There are some strange things happening in Washington these days. The Labor Secretary is under active inspector general investigation over alleged misconduct — drinking on the job, an alleged affair with a member of her security detail, misuse of taxpayer funds for personal travel — while her husband was barred from the building after at least two female staffers accused him of sexual assault.

Clearly there were some real questions about Kristi Noem’s marriage loyalty too. Those came out in the last hearing. But it feels like the firing was intended to brush everything under the rug.

And more than loyalty to one person I often think about loyalty to the job. Are we safer with the changes Kristi Noem made? I’m not so sure. Time will test that theory.

The Premature Obituary Problem

One of the things in Washington I get most frustrated with is our short memories. When a firing happens, we’re expected to move on. Even when the individual who was under question gets a still more ridiculous title, Shield of America or whatever.

But there are still lingering questions. The ad contract is only one of them. The private prison companies — look into GEO Group, for example — that are getting the ICE contracts after political donations, seeing record profits under this administration. Money paid for by taxpayers.

I sometimes get into debates with Republicans about things like this. “Finally seeing clearly,” they’ll say, implying I let the Biden team slide. But I remember being so frustrated with Pete Buttigieg when I found out that while running the Department of Transportation he was flying on private planes. That was absurd.

I think we have to be clear-eyed on it all, especially if we want the money to go to the places intended.

That brings us back to an important department, currently unfunded, that won’t get new leadership until the end of the month, during a war that Trump changes the timeframe on every few minutes.

Markwayne Mullin will soon take over, and I don’t know what to expect. It is worth noting — as almost no one has — that he will be the first Native American to lead DHS, a genuinely historic milestone that has received approximately zero coverage. That said, more important is that he’ll inherit all of their open ledgers. I’m guessing, because I’ve seen this before, that if there are issues, he’ll try to quietly fix them and move on (if he’s capable or competent which we’ll find out). All the while Kristi Noem will be doing whatever she’s doing at Shield of America.

But I think that isn’t enough. We deserve to know what happened, and we deserve to know how we’re keeping the country safe.

Demand the audit. The obituary can wait.

So just a week ago, headed into the State of the Union, I challenged myself to find the places where I could agree with President Trump. His speech was long, often unnecessarily partisan, but I found a couple—particularly when he spoke about peace and freedom, and the people who sacrifice for those values. I can stand for that.

In a matter of days, though, President Trump reverted to type. A week later, the notion of standing for peace seems like a distant memory as President Trump launched a war in Iran.

And I’m left wondering: what happened to fixing things here first? The saying was America First.

I know what that means to plenty of my friends who supported President Trump. It does not mean kicking off even a medium-term regional war and bombing campaign. It means—let’s solve our problems. We all know them. An education system that’s lagging. Infrastructure that’s crumbling. Manufacturing that’s leaving. That was what they trusted President Trump to focus on.

Instead, we have another war in the Middle East.

A war no one voted for

On Saturday, President Trump joined Israel to launch joint military strikes against Iran. Iran retaliated across the Gulf, hitting U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and beyond. At least six American service members have been killed. Trade routes are threatened, oil prices are likely to jump. On Monday, Trump said it would take four to five weeks, maybe longer, and even offered he might put boots on the ground.

Former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, now serving as “Secretary of War,” declared: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it.”

Just to be clear: The Iranian regime has long been awful, a country led by those who chant: “Death to America.”

But starting this war, that was definitely this administration. No one in Congress voted for military action. The President said last week they were going to try to talk. I guess talking got too hard.

I remember those who beat the drums of war when we went into Iraq. It stung an entire generation. A friend predicted war the minute Bush was elected. In the grief and fear after 9/11, a lot of people went along, and without a clear target, Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” led to a war that my generation would pay for.

President Obama was against the war in Iraq, which is part of why I worked for him. He still stumbled into the same theory in Libya. Brutal dictator falls, freedom will rise. I met Gaddafi once, a strange, awful man. He was terrible but his absence post military action didn’t build democracy. Libya is still a mess.

What strikes me most is that many of the people cheering this operation are largely the same ones who said Obama needed a plan for Libya. And some of those in leadership positions now, I’m thinking of Tulsi Gabbard, said their politics were shaped by the Middle East misadventures of the Bush years.

Now they just trust Trump?

Messes in our own backyards

The problems festering at home aren’t just problems of Trump’s inattention. They reflect an internal rot, an inattention to things affecting Americans’ day-to-day lives.

Last week the FBI raided the home and office of Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, serving more than 500,000 students. On Friday, the school board voted unanimously to place him on paid administrative leave. At $440,000 a year, he keeps collecting paychecks while the investigation proceeds. Money that’s not going to teachers, as the district debates layoffs.

The probe appears tied to LAUSD’s contract with AllHere, a startup hired to build an AI chatbot called “Ed,” pitched as a solution to chronic absenteeism. The contract was worth up to $6 million. LAUSD paid roughly $3 million before the company collapsed; its founder later charged with fraud, allegedly using investor money to pay for her wedding and purchase of her own home.

Beyond the clear fraud: who thought a chatbot was going to keep kids in school? In my experience, it’s amazing teachers who go above and beyond. Real people keep kids in school.

Carvalho, who proudly states he’s been in public education for three decades, somehow amassed $6.3 million in real estate across California and Florida—two luxury condos in a Miami high-rise, a $2.4 million home in Miami Shores, and properties in Fort Lauderdale. His California home he bought directly from State Senator Laura Richardson when he arrived in Los Angeles. And before he left Miami, the local inspector general found his foundation had accepted $1.57 million from a company seeking district contracts—it was called an “appearance of impropriety.” Rather than return the money, the foundation distributed it as $100 gift cards to teachers. Why did LAUSD hire him? I can’t shake the feeling that something doesn’t smell right.

I’m a public school kid and a public school mom. Many of the teachers in public education are some of the most devoted people I’ve ever met. So however this shakes out, if people were stealing from the system, they’re stealing from our kids’ future. That kind of rot, regardless of party, makes me furious.

It’s also harder to address when our collective attention and oxygen is consumed by another war in the Middle East.

I can’t help but think we’re failing our kids—right when they need us to prioritize their future.

I had a hard time shaking that feeling as I drove my son to school yesterday. He knew about the war, the news had been on all weekend. “I’m just trying to ignore it,” he said. He’s thirteen. Sadly, I don’t think he’s the only one.

That numbness worries me as much as the war itself.

Vice President JD Vance promises this war in Iran is not Iraq. But who knows what you’re getting into when it all starts? Are we at war with an ideology? A regime? An ally’s enemy? And why are we only willing to trust a war when it’s started by our own political side?

I heard Dana Perino yesterday say she was proud we were freeing the women of Iran. When we launch bombs into a country, create chaos and instability, does it ever immediately lead to more freedom for women? That’s not my experience.

Peace through strength, President Trump always says. If we want strength, I’ve got to believe the only way is to start at home.

I’ve been around enough State of the Union addresses to know they are — at their core — theater. (And for staffers, a lot of work.)

I remember in my early days of the Obama administration, I used to escort the White House press corps to a holding room to watch on the cameras (they don’t get to go inside). I would meet the folks at the Capitol who would orchestrate the whole thing, and watch Congressional offices take themselves all too seriously.

I saw what real power looks like up close. And I know how a performative statement, or, as we’ve seen, a color-coded response, can fall completely flat.

In truth, I didn’t always hate State of the Unions. I actually do believe, still, that words matter. And there’s an importance of a ceremony. There was even a time when I thought a well-turned phrase from the right president in the right room could actually move something.

I’m not sure, in this era of political division, I believe that anymore. It’s like everyone just wants to be right.

But that got me thinking. I not someone who makes it a habit of standing to applause President Donald Trump. I worked for the other side. I worked for a President that Donald Trump actively belittles and accuses of everything from spilling the beans on aliens to treason. Not only did I work for President Obama, I believe in what he stood for.

That we are not red states or blue states, but the United States.

So, what would Donald Trump have to say tonight to actually get me to stand? Let’s be clear, I’m not in Congress, so we’re talking about my living room. Or maybe metaphorical standing. But in Congress or the living room, what would get me, just a citizen skeptic, on my feet?

I started thinking about it, and turns out, there are some things. And that surprised even me.

Here’s What Would Get Me Standing

America is strong.

No caveats. No “strong again.” No “strong because of me,” and/or “if not for me we’d be a failing nation.” The tired implication that the men and women who built this military, drove this innovation, and built the strongest global currency were somehow failures until he showed up? They weren’t. We weren’t.

If President Trump just looked in the camera and said, without caveat, we are strong — I’m up on my feet. Because we are. We sometimes fail to use our strength to advantage our workers or our families nearly enough. But we are still strong.

We need to work together.

I would love to see a robust plan for America that strengthens our manufacturing sector and exports, supports our small businesses and entrepreneurs. That’s not what we have right now, but it’s what we could have.

The Supreme Court handed him a decision on Friday practically begging him to work with Congress on tariffs. I’m a Democrat who grew up in manufacturing America. I want manufacturing to stay in America. If he reaches across the aisle on this one, genuinely, I’m not just standing. I’m the first one up. I’m willing to look at any plan to strengthen American security and manufacturing.

I’d also love to work on: Education. I want public schools that reward excellent teachers, exit the ones who aren’t doing the job, and pay for performance. On so much we can agree. I want us to be the best in the world and actually mean it.

We probably have different roads to get there — but if he names the destination, I’ll acknowledge we’re headed the same direction, especially if he expresses the desire to work together to get there.

We need to prioritize America’s health.

And I mean real health. Not the bespoke agenda of a man who, and I say this with the full receipts the Internet has provided, used to snort coke off toilet seats (RFK Jr.).

For me, real health means healthy water. Healthy air. Healthy communities. Regardless of zip code. The social fabric we’ve been quietly shredding for a decade. (Frankly real health to me will likely require medicare for all, but we’ll get there).

In truth, our country and too many people are struggling with loneliness, with insecurity. The quiet crisis of people who are angry because they are not okay. If President Trump names this honestly, I’m standing — and then I want to talk about how we solve this collective illness together.

Getting there together does not mean repealing the informed health regulations that actually protect people.

America should be safe for everyone.

No Americans should be gunned down unjustly in the street. No officers gunned down for doing their job. No one here seeking freedom should be denied a hearing. A secure border and updated immigration laws go hand in hand — because you don’t get to claim you want solutions if you only want half the sentence. I’ll stand for the whole sentence.

If President Trump could state this plainly, I could stand. (I’m still rooting for compromise to bring back the important Department of Homeland Security, with oversight concerns rightly addressed).

America is better for the freedoms we enjoy.

That’s the whole point.

People have always been searching for more freedom. We have been far from perfect in delivering it. We have enslaved, entrapped, and allowed many to suffer in the pursuit. But we have to keep pushing, for more rights and more freedoms. It is what makes our country unique and distinct and special.

And from the party that built its brand on not canceling people, maybe that’s somewhere we can actually agree?

I would like to think so.

Here’s What Will Keep Me Seated

Let’s start with personal grievances. Nothing is so defeating for so many of us, though, than the cult of personality President Trump puts around himself.

If he says he alone can fix it, we know that’s not true. He can’t. Nobody can. Honestly, he can’t even rebuild the east wing alone. I’ve watched enough presidents up close to know that the ones who governed best knew they couldn’t do it alone.

Another thing – If he blames one party for everything — one party didn’t break it, one party won’t fix it.

And lastly, if it’s all golden-age marketing with no actual plan behind it, I’ve heard enough about having the greatest healthcare system without a single plan to get us there.

I want the plan. Not “notions of a plan.” Or talking points. He will likely have enough time to deliver it. Let me hear it.

What I realized going through this thought exercise is how deeply I root for an America with shared values, where we can all stand. Where certain things transcend party. Where we can overlook who came up with the idea.

So here’s what I’ll do: If President Trump says something that gets me standing tonight, I’ll drop a note on Substack. And please let me know if you hear anything that does the same. I actually do hope it happens.

I guess I don’t know if it will.

Dark clouds. I could see aircraft overhead. Our country was under attack. I remember waking up, startled, and thinking of the line: If we’d known then what we know now, would we take it all more seriously?

I have friends who are filmmakers. They were in Israel before October 7, filming interviews with politicians who had the most vitriol for each other. This was the height of Benjamin Netanyahu’s push to overhaul the judiciary, with Israelis in the streets for months, their country tearing at its own seams. And then their citizens would be attacked.

It always seems that when a country’s leaders turn against each other, their countries are most vulnerable.

For months now I’ve been writing about how we’ve turned against each other, refusing to see each other’s perspective. And now we’ve shut down — at least partially — the Department of Homeland Security.

We have to ask ourselves: What are we doing here?

What We Built After 9/11

The Department of Homeland Security is relatively new as federal agencies go.

It came about after our country was attacked on 9/11, as a response to failures many of us watched in real-time — government agencies needed to talk to each other. Signed into law in November 2002, and functioning by March of the following year, DHS consolidated 22 federal agencies to help keep our homeland safe.

That logic seems to be a distant memory. I remember Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for President as a Republican, amplifying 9/11 conspiracy theories and calling for a Saudi investigation into events we witnessed and investigated in real time. And recently, Cenk Uygur, who ran as a Democrat in the same cycle, posted that he no longer believes the official 9/11 account.

This is not a left or right failure.

It’s a bipartisan collapse of institutional trust, fed by an attention economy where the loudest voice wins. Abandoning the institution built from the lessons of the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil should give us pause and rightfully worry us, especially as Congress takes a recess rather than stay to negotiate funding the agency, with proper oversight.

A Leadership Problem

The Department of Homeland Security is currently run by Kristi Noem. I’m not her biggest fan — but you don’t need to take my word for it.

Tomi Lahren, a right-leaning influencer who once interned in Noem’s office in South Dakota, has been clear-eyed about her: She’s corrupt, she told me.

Noem has also told us who she is. In a book published during the presidential campaign, she admitted to shooting a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she said was untrainable. In my experience, it’s the trainer, not the dog. She shot her own dog because of her own failures.

Yet Donald Trump gave her the keys to one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government.

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation published last week, Noem and her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski, both married, are having an alleged relationship described by a FEMA official as “the worst-kept secret in D.C.”

The Journal reported they berate senior staff, administer polygraph tests to employees they distrust, and have created significant dysfunction across the department. Lewandowski, technically capped at 130 days of government service per year as a special government employee, reportedly functions as Noem’s de facto chief of staff, a formal title Trump reportedly denied him because of the relationship rumors.

The Journal also reported that Lewandowski fired a U.S. Coast Guard pilot because Noem’s blanket wasn’t transferred when she had to switch planes due to a maintenance issue. The pilot was only reinstated because no one else was available to fly them home.

This all comes after multiple outlets reported that Noem’s purse was stolen at a Washington DC restaurant last April, with $3,000 in cash inside. Honestly you’re the Homeland Security Secretary and you lose $3,000 cash? I have some questions.

These are not isolated incidents. They are a portrait of judgment. Trump, asked about the Noem-Lewandowski relationship aboard Air Force One, said he hadn’t heard about it. Reports suggest otherwise.

Any discussion of shutting down DHS should start here, with the incompetence and corruption in front of us.

The Cost of the Shutdown

The DHS shutdown was triggered by Democrats demanding accountability after federal agents fatally shot two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, during protests in Minneapolis in January.

Their demands are not radical: body cameras, identification requirements, judicial warrants for arrests on private property. Basic accountability measures applied to every other law enforcement officer in this country.

That President Trump cannot see that — and that the Keystone Cop-level leaders he has in place in this department can’t see that — is infuriating and debilitating to our nation’s security.

Meanwhile, more people died in ICE custody in 2025 than in the previous four years combined. According to reporting by The Guardian and NPR, at least 32 people died in ICE detention last year, the deadliest year since 2004. The Office of Detention Oversight, the internal watchdog responsible for investigating those deaths, does not operate when shutdown.

Congress is not even in session this week.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who defers almost entirely to Trump, evidently is not in a position to negotiate independently. And Trump, who built his brand on saying “you’re fired,” has proven oddly reluctant to remove people who are embarrassing him and failing the public.

What We’re Leaving Unguarded

Among the agencies most affected by the shutdown is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) the part of DHS specifically charged with protecting American critical infrastructure from cyberattacks, at a moment when threats from Russia, China, and others are well-documented and escalating. Leaving CISA understaffed is not an abstraction. It is a vulnerability, created by choice.

Abroad, President Trump is positioning himself as a broker of peace in the Middle East, a region that was vulnerable in part because Israel’s leaders were too busy fighting each other to pay enough attention to what was building at their border. The parallel is not subtle.

I have to wonder: What are we leaving unguarded while we fight amongst ourselves?

I see this most clearly with my teenage son. When I ask where he gets his information, the answer is most normally: social media, influencers, Reddit. Sources his friends also cite, forming their own ecosystem of truth.

My news diet looks nothing like his. I’m still subscribed to The Washington Post, even after they laid off much of their reporting staff (I had pre-bought my year-long subscription). I try to read across the spectrum, from Breitbart to Politico, from overseas outlets to popular podcasts, working to piece together what’s actually happening.

Everyone’s news consumption is fractured now. And those filters don’t just inform our perspectives. They create entirely separate realities.

Which is why the Super Bowl feels increasingly precious. Even for someone like me who really doesn’t have a football team I root for.

One hundred twenty-seven million Americans at least (early estimates predict), gathered around the same screen, watching the same game, seeing the same high-cost commercials. It’s kind of our last campfire. The question is: What are we doing with that rare moment of collective attention?

This year’s answer depressed me.

The Distraction Olympics

I’ll be honest. I was a high school football cheerleader, and I found this game dull. My husband desperately wanted his Lions there. No luck. For me, the draw was probably Bad Bunny. I have friends who are superfans, and the controversy piqued my interest.

He’d sing in Spanish, as he always does, and that has brought about his popularity. Turning Point USA responded by hosting Kid Rock as counter-programming. Both singers’ lyrics would make my grandmothers turn off the TV, but both have their fans. Both singers’ lyrics can be hard to understand, even for a native language speaker.

The week before the game, we argued about language. Some had near melt-downs about whether the halftime show should be in Spanish or English. Never mind that both are colonizers’ languages. The British and Spanish brought them here, erasing what came before. Never mind that real-time translation could have solved the whole manufactured problem.

We had the debate anyway. We always do.

Meanwhile, President Trump, who spent his first term dominating every news cycle, who once would have been interviewed during the broadcast itself, was relegated to posting angry reactions after the fact. In some ways that felt maybe like progress, or I guess proof that we’ll always find something to fight about (even when it’s not Trump).

Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction still outranks all of this in Super Bowl controversy history.

We’re very good at being outraged by the wrong things.

What We Didn’t Talk About

Here’s what we missed while arguing about halftime shows: The cascade of under-regulated technologies advertised during breaks that are quietly rewiring our children’s futures.

Crypto companies bought prime ad space (again). This time just months after another exchange collapse wiped out billions in savings. The industry remains largely unregulated, with no meaningful consumer protections, yet we’re still being sold on digital gold as the future of money.

Our kids are watching and some singalong to the Backstreet Boys, but it doesn’t change the dubious and under regulated nature of cryptocurrency.

AI companies showcased tools that will reshape every job in the next decade. They’re training their models on all or our data, including our children’s data, their homework, their creative work, with no guardrails, no long-term studies, no societal consensus on what we’re building.

But the commercials sure were slick.

Pharmaceutical companies advertised GLP-1 drugs that are now being prescribed to teenagers, despite having no long-term data on how they affect developing bodies. We’ve gone from the obesity epidemic to the weight-loss revolution without pausing to ask what happens in twenty years.

There was even an ad about family farms (produced on behalf of Lays) in an era where regulations are making it incredibly difficult for families to maintain family farms.

These aren’t fringe concerns.

These are the forces actively reshaping the world our children will inherit. We had 127 million people watching the same broadcast, a genuine cultural miracle in 2026, and instead of focusing on those issues, we spent it arguing about a language debate that, especially in unique art, to me, doesn’t actually make a long-term difference. (Don’t get me wrong, the underlying immigration debate is crucial and deserves our attention, but which language an artist sings in? I would rather make sure the audio issues and subtitles are resolved).

The Cost of Distraction

I’m not naïve enough to think a football game should become a policy seminar. People deserve entertainment. They deserve escape. The Super Bowl has always been part spectacle, part circus.

But there’s something uniquely American about our ability to transform every shared moment into a new front in the culture war, while the actual war, the one being waged by unregulated technology and unchecked corporate power, rages on unnoticed, and way under-debated.

We’re so busy being distracted that we don’t realize we’re choosing the distractions ourselves.

My son’s generation, our children’s generation, will live in a world where AI makes hiring decisions, where digital currencies might replace the dollar, where weight-loss drugs are seemingly as common as Advil. And family farms are too rare. They’ll inherit the consequences of our regulatory failures and our unwillingness to have hard conversations about innovation versus safety, big business versus small.

And when they ask what we were doing when all this was being decided, we’ll have to tell them: We were arguing about whether a halftime show should be in Spanish.

We had America’s attention. All of it, at once, for a few precious hours. We could have used it to start real conversations about the future barreling toward us.

Instead, we got distracted. Again.

And we’re still missing the point.

We were speaking together at the University of Arizona shortly before the election. Trump’s former White House press secretary was very confident about what he thought was coming. I don’t bet, but he was right. Trump won decisively, sweeping battlegrounds and expanding his coalition in ways few predicted.

This week Spicer sounds rattled when he talks about Republican chances this fall. And for good reason.

After a weekend election that saw Democrats upset the Republican candidate in Texas’ conservative Tarrant County — a district Trump carried by 17 points just 15 months ago — Spicer got a gut check from Republican officials across Texas.

Their response was a universal alarm. One told him directly, “This is 8.5 on the Richter scale.”

On The Huddle Sean’s morning show he warned: “If you don’t get the message, enjoy Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.” Personally, I think I would enjoy a balance of power. Zooming out a bit, though, I think we should all clock that’s a stark contrast Sean paints from when we were together a little more than a year ago.

Back then, Sean was confident, willing to take big bets. Today? The bet’s off. And for Texas, a state I’ve been deeply skeptical about as a Democrat, that’s telling.

What’s The Matter with Texas?

In Texas Senate District 9, the conservative Tarrant County suburbs around Fort Worth, Union Leader and Air Force Veteran, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election Saturday by 14 points. Trump carried the district by 17 points in November 2024. That’s a 31-point swing.

That’s a stunning number. Here are a few others:

• Republicans outspent Rehmet six-to-one: $2.5 million to $400,000.

• Trump posted three times urging GOP turnout. (A lot of oxygen for a single state Senate race.)

• Rehmet still won Election Day voting 58-42%. He won some of the district’s darkest-red areas.

• Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris by more than 50 points with Hispanic voters in Fort Worth.

• One last point that’s not a number, but I really enjoyed: When asked on CNN if Donald Trump mattered to the election results he replied that Trump wasn’t a voter in his district. He stuck to facts and the issues that mattered to his voters.

Special elections generally see a much smaller turnout and rarely forecast outcomes.

A trend is emerging, though: In Iowa, Democrats went 3-for-3 in special elections throughout 2025, breaking the GOP supermajority. In November, Democrats swept every statewide race: governors in Virginia and New Jersey, the New York City mayor, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. They gained 25 state legislative seats without losing a single one. And with that new leaders are emerging.

The Latino Swing-Back

One of the biggest swing demographics of 2024 was Latino voters.

In that race, Trump took 55% of Texas Latino voters, a 28-point swing from 2020. Border counties that hadn’t voted Republican in over a century flipped red.

A year later was a different story. In Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats won Latinos by 2-to-1 margins. In New Jersey’s Passaic County, nearly half Latino, Trump won by 3 points in 2024. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won it by 15.

Then came the Texas special election. Exit polls showed Rehmet captured 9 out of 10 Latino voters, according to Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy.

Rehmet’s massive overperformance undoubtedly is due to a variety of factors, including very local issues like schools and employers. But it’s also evidence that despite the desire to close the border, ICE action is widely unpopular.

There’s the stories of ICE detaining US citizens, those who have been on the pathway to legal citizenship. I was deeply troubled this weekend to see the news of a measles outbreak in a detention facility where children are detained. It’s not just Latinos I’m seeing show up in different ways. I’m seeing young people, some in my family in Kansas who have never been vocal in politics, speak out against what’s going on.

And then there’s the economy: Costs of healthcare going up, and prices for everything from goods to housing aren’t going down. (The cost of eggs is decidedly down, the risk for bird flu though likely up.)

Either way, the flip in recent polling with Latino voters is a troubling sign for Republicans: More than 70 percent are saying they disapprove of Trump and of his voters, 13 percent say they won’t vote for him again.

Messing with Texas

I don’t chase false hope in Texas. It’s a graveyard for Democrats’ overhype machine. A huge investment for almost no real gains.

In 2022, I called Beto O’Rourke the biggest loser of the election. He ran a well-funded and very well-hyped Senate race. He also had a DWI he reportedly tried to flee, perceived favors for his father-in-law in his past. I readied the prediction before the election, he would be a big loser. I was right. He lost by 11 points.

But this feels different. Beto’s not on the ballot. And a Republican primary might hand Democrats a gift.

There’s a US Senate Seat that could be up for grabs in Texas.

Ken Paxton, the embattled and scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General, is polling neck-and-neck with four-term incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary.

Paxton was impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House in 2023 for bribery, abuse of office, and having an extramarital affair with a woman his donor employed. His wife who had been a political ally eventually turned on him. Though acquitted by the Texas Senate, he didn’t dispute the facts. And yet, he’s running for higher office.

Paxton is slightly leading Republican polls right now. But he’s tied 46-46 with both leading Democratic candidates in general election matchups. If current Senator John Cornyn wins the primary, he would lead Democrats (right now) by 3-5 points.

The race is crowded on the Republican side, but voting in March will likely set up a head to head match for May, and right now Cornyn and Paxton would be the bets.

On the Democratic side, there’s State Rep. James Talarico, a 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian who flipped a Trump district, has earned praise from former President Obama and surprisingly Joe Rogan, doesn’t take corporate PAC money, and calls Christian nationalism “a cancer on our religion,” while speaking of his faith quite often. Or Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a nationally recognized combative progressive Trump says he “loathes.”

We’ll see who wins, but if it’s Paxton versus Talarico? Texas could be very interesting. And not just in the Senate race. There are some other outside the box candidates, including Latin Grammy winner Bobby Pulido who announced he would run for Congress in Texas in a recently gerrymandered district.

Lonestar Preview

The Texas primary is March 3, just a month away. Most people aren’t paying attention. Runoffs, which will certainly happen to decide between the top two contenders, are May 26. We’ll know soon-ish whether Republicans nominate Ken Paxton to run for Senate, handing Democrats an opening in a state they haven’t won statewide since 1994.

Sean Spicer was right about 2024. Perhaps that’s why I decided to look a little closer at his warning for Republicans and what it means for Democrats, even if I’ve been skeptical of chasing Texas before.

I didn’t bet Spicer in 2024. But all bets are off on Texas now.

For a state I’ve been skeptical about for years, that alone tells me something’s shifting.

Here we are again. How are we here again?

An American shot dead in the street by federal agents. Again in Minneapolis. This time a 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti who cared for veterans at the VA hospital. Once again we’re facing questions about why deadly force is the only response in this situation.

I thought this time might be different.

Pretti seemed to believe in the Second Amendment, he had a valid Minnesota permit to carry a firearm. He had no criminal record.

Video shows him with a cell phone in his hand when federal agents tackled him, removed his gun, and fired potentially ten shots in less than five seconds while he was prone on the ground. He’d been trying to help a woman who’d been pushed down and pepper-sprayed.

It makes me furious that we are here again. What makes me frustrated, though, is that the circumstances of Pretti’s death should have given us pause and brought us together for reform.

Instead it is a case study in how quickly events are twisted and distorted.

A Brief Opening

In the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s death something unusual happened.

The administration’s narrative that Pretti was an “assassin” who wanted to “massacre law enforcement” was so transparently false that even allies pushed back. The President said he didn’t like the shooting. The NRA defended a citizen’s right to carry. Gun rights groups in Minnesota said peaceable people don’t lose their Second Amendment rights at protests. Republican senators like Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins called for investigations.

For maybe 24 hours, I thought: maybe this is it. Maybe killing a legal gun owner exercising his constitutional rights finally cuts across tribal lines. Maybe this is the moment that forces accountability.

Then I watched conservative media do its work.

The Spincycle Corrects

Within 48 hours, the machine had done what it does: Twist, distort, distract.

Commentators, like Jesse Watters, called protesters “terrorists” who must “behave well and submit immediately.” Megyn Kelly, who’d initially tweeted (sarcastically) that Trump should pull ICE out of Minnesota, reversed herself completely within days, saying Pretti was “being subversive” and “looking to cause trouble.”

What I realized watching it unfold is that the narrative doesn’t get reframed over time. Different people see completely different pictures depending on who’s narrating. Those viewing the same video with different commentators are seeing entirely different events. There’s no shared baseline of facts to argue from. Just tribal loyalty determining which picture you’re allowed to see.

And Minnesota’s four Republican members of Congress?

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer blamed Democratic leadership for “empowering criminals.” The other three (Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber) tweeted either suggesting the full investigation or retweeted the President (unfortunately for Finstad he forgot to cut out the instructions on how he should retweet).

One might expect more from their elected leaders after two US citizens were killed by federal agents in their state in three weeks. Though all four issued a joint statement on Thursday reflecting on Laken Riley, the young woman from Georgia, who was killed by an undocumented immigrant one year ago.

The Bigger Picture

While all of this unfolds, the government funding deadline hits Friday.

Senate Democrats are refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security without accountability measures for ICE: body cameras, use-of-force standards, prohibitions on raiding schools and hospitals. They need seven Republicans to break ranks. We have five expressing concern. Two more would make the difference.

I’m not feeling optimistic.

Because I’m also watching the larger context. While Governor Tim Walz is begging the administration to remove ICE from Minnesota, Venezuela’s acting president told Trump she’s had enough of his interference. (This after the President tried to claim credit for democracy work that won María Corina Machado a Nobel Peace Prize.) The EU and India just signed a massive free trade deal without us. Canada’s Mark Carney encouraged “middle powers” to chart their own course. There’s a lot going on in the world.

And I realized: this moment of pause from the White House is just that. A moment. Brief. Then when the President feels cornered, facing blowback from enemies and allies alike, he’s going to lash out and create more chaos. The cycle will likely continue.

What Minnesota Tells Us

My friends in Minnesota report everyone is on alert.

There are more federal agents in the state than local police officers. Many worry they could be next, and for good reason. Alex Pretti had mourned for Renée Nicole Good, killed by ICE just seventeen days earlier. Then he became the next victim.

I saw Megyn Kelly’s initial tweet suggesting we pull ICE out of Minnesota, make it a sanctuary for all asylum seekers, and let the state handle what the federal government can’t. I thought about that unusual idea: leave Minnesota alone. It reminded me there used to be a conservative pro-states’ rights perspective. What if, in situations where we can resolve nothing at the federal level, states got more authority?

We’re already seeing California team with Western states to provide our own health recommendations. Could states work together on issues the federal government seems incapable of handling?

Trump made no secret of his desire to oversee the largest mass deportation in American history. Is he really going to back down after a call with a former rival and daily punching bag? I doubt it. There’s enough on Trump’s plate that backing down might be wise. But I don’t see him taking that advice.

So instead we’re at an impasse, frustrating Minnesota, the American public, and much of the world.

What We Can Do

It’s easy to give into the feeling that this is hopeless. I don’t believe that, though. And I often hear from readers: what can we do?

There’s a lot we can do.

We can keep tabs on our elected leaders. Let them know when we agree and disagree with their actions. You’d be surprised how many people just aren’t calling their legislators. Minnesota’s Republicans are staying silent because they’ve calculated that silence is safer than accountability. Prove them wrong.

We can talk to each other, even in disagreement. It’s only through that disagreement we can understand perspectives hardened by isolation, especially when we turn on each other instead.

We can keep hope alive. I’ve heard old dogs can learn new tricks, but I haven’t really seen it. And I’m not sure a President who only doubles down when times get tough is really going to change.

But we as a country can change fast. I saw it happen in the 2008 election and it can happen again.

Good people can still make a world of difference. There are a lot of good people in America, on both sides of the political aisle. We still have time. I don’t give up hope on us yet, even knowing it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

Twelve months ago today, Donald Trump took the Oath of Office for the second time. Standing indoors at the Capitol Rotunda, with extreme cold forcing him inside, he was surrounded by oligarchs and tech billionaires who had each donated a million dollars or more to be there.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook. America’s elite, front and center. Trump promised a new “Golden Age” ahead as he became President again.

That same day, he signed a flurry of executive orders he said would catalyze this new era. He would repeal DEI. End “gender ideology” in federal spaces. Pause foreign assistance. Boost domestic oil production. Promise tariffs that would make Americans rich again.

A year later, I’m seeing a lot of people — many of them personally surprising to me — who are rightly skeptical of whether Trump is keeping his promise. Among his most ardent supporters there’s real doubts and discussions about his priorities. And then there’s a question of just who is getting rich.

The Disappointment I’m Seeing

As my regular readers know, I’m from Galesburg, Illinois. It’s a factory town in a swing district (one of the increasingly few left in our country). I’ve stayed Facebook friends with many people from my high school who have different political views than me.

What I’m reading lately on facebook isn’t the usual partisan cheerleading.

One friend — clearly a Trump voter — posted after the capture of Venezuela’s Maduro: “We got Madurai [sic] before the Epstein files...that’s crazy work...your [sic] welcome again Israel SMFH.”

A pro-Trump commenter jumped in: “You think it’s bad now imagine in an alternate universe where Kamala won the election.”

His response was something I’ve heard from a lot of Trump supporters lately: “Most definitely not the trump from the first term. I just didn’t expect this from him. I was die hard Trump just disappointing ya know.”

This kind of skepticism isn’t new to me. I saw it with supporters who expected more from President Obama. Some were more prominent than others.

At President Obama’s first UN General Assembly, Matt Damon stopped by our White House staff office to introduce himself. He was filming at the hotel hosting the President and wanted to say thank you. He talked to all of us, even chatted with my husband who happened to be visiting. He was gracious, genuine, full of praise.

A few years later, Matt Damon announced he wouldn’t support President Obama’s reelection. Climate change. Obama hadn’t gone far enough.

What I’m seeing now feels different, though.

Matt Damon is a millionaire movie star who’ll be fine, he felt Obama hadn’t gone far enough, he had a voice and used it. Disaffected supporters, particularly wealth ones, are pretty common in national politics.

What felt different is that my friend’s disappointment is existential. He bet on Trump because he’s watching his community hollow out, jobs disappear, his kids’ futures narrow. He didn’t need Trump to go further. He needed Trump to show up for him at all. And he’s not seeing it.

And I understand why people from places like Galesburg voted for Trump. I never shared it, but I get it. Biden was a product of government. He was in Washington their entire lives as things got worse. (His age did not help, either.) Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t get a full chance to introduce herself, and to many she represented judgment from someone whose life was impossibly distant from theirs. The Malibu house purchase recently probably doesn’t help.

So the trust was with Trump, the millionaire from New York who would somehow stand against the elites because the thought was he was self-funded, because of a perception he couldn’t be bought.

What That Trust Bought

One year later, let’s look at the record.

Trump signed 225 executive orders in 2025, the most in a first year since FDR. Congress passed one major bill: the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a massive tax cut the Congressional Budget Office says will add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Let’s look at the things he promised:

Jobs? America added just 584,000 in 2025, the worst year since 2020, second worst since the 2009 financial crisis. Healthcare added 713,000 jobs. Manufacturing lost 68,000. Blue-collar work, the backbone of Galesburg, took the hit.

Inflation? Still eating paychecks. Food prices jumped 3.1% by December. That “Golden Age” Trump promised? He now says affordability is “a hoax.” Most of the time he’s defending his economy, he sounds a lot like Biden, but this time both the data and sentiment isn’t on his side.

Tariffs? They materialized in April and, aside from some jokes about taxing penguins on remote islands, they also crashed the stock market. Then Trump backed off. They’re collecting revenue but slowing exports.

The trade deficit he vowed to eliminate? Likely to the tariffs’ credit, it went down. But there’s a waiting game for US companies, questions about how he enacted the tariffs and a pending Supreme Court decision.

And then there are the pardons. On his first day back, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants. At least 33 reportedly have been rearrested or charged with other crimes. Child sex crimes, illegal weapons, drunk driving that killed people.

There are other less heralded pardons of fraudsters and financial criminals, too, like one woman, Andriana Camberos, who he has pardoned twice, in each of his terms, for two separate multi-million dollar bilking schemes.

In the President’s wide ranging pardons he wiped out approximately $1.3 billion in court-ordered restitution. Money owed to police officers beaten defending the Capitol. Money owed to fraud victims, union workers, investors, employees whose paychecks were stolen. When January 6 defendants were ordered to pay for Capitol repairs, only 15% had paid before Trump erased the rest. American taxpayers are covering the bill.

Previous presidents required people to accept responsibility, make restitution, show remorse. Trump pardoned people who hadn’t paid a dime, then his Justice Department started arguing they should get refunds for what little they had paid. That’s not mercy. That’s a wealth transfer from victims to the guilty.

So what’s Trump been focused on besides pardons (and certainly not releasing the Epstein files in full)? Greenland. Foreign wars. Last week he went on some long riff in Detroit about how he’s misunderstood. In a press conference today he took yet another 2 hours to try to make his case. He’s had plenty of time to make his case.

The border? Yes, crossings dropped dramatically. From 137,000 apprehensions in March 2024 to 7,000 in March 2025. That’s real. Still, ICE is now detaining 65,000 people, three-quarters with no criminal record, while claiming to target “dangerous criminals.” Even Joe Rogan is shaking his head.

The Opening Ahead

My friend from Galesburg isn’t wrong to be disappointed. Trump picked different battles than promised. He’s surrounding himself with the very elites he claimed to fight.

One year in, my assessment is that many Americans are ready to move on. The question is: move on to whom? It’s very unclear who will fill the trust vacuum.

Let’s be clear, though: There’s an opening here. Trust is low everywhere. Americans are frustrated with elites making decisions for forgotten communities. They’re tired of being told the economy is great when their paychecks don’t stretch.

Someone could step into this moment with a real plan. Not promises of Golden Ages, but practical solutions that make life more affordable, jobs more secure, communities more stable. Someone who understands these communities’ fears aren’t bigotry but economic anxiety.

Trump had everything one year ago. Both chambers of Congress. A Supreme Court. A mandate. The trust of millions who’d been ignored for decades.

One year later, he squandered a lot of that personal grievances, elite gatherings, and pardons for people who owed money to cops they beat.

The Golden Age hasn’t come, but the hunger for one is real. Americans are still waiting for someone to get it right.

Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last Wednesday. Two Midwesterners now inextricably linked in tragedy as debate over America’s immigration law intensifies. The aftermath has focused, like so much of our discussion these days, on whose side you are on. Ross is a murderer. Good is a terrorist. And on and on.

The better question is what brought them to the intersection.

We’ve been stuck in a debate over laws that have not changed, not meaningfully, in my entire adult life.

I saw news of Good’s death just a day after I’d released a column about Venezuela, where I focused on the President saying he would now run that country. When I first saw the news out of Minneapolis I thought: How can we run Venezuela, when we can barely run Minneapolis?

In the days since Good’s children lost their mother and Ross’s life changed forever, people in power have drawn instant conclusions. So too it seems have many members of the public. I wondered how much these two have in common: Both children of the 80s, both raised in Midwestern families, both trapped by our political dysfunction.

One is dead. One was already injured. I really wish neither of them had been there.

Two Lives, Same Generation

Ross is 43. My age. He reportedly graduated from high school in Peoria, Ill., just 40 minutes from where I grew up. He served in the Indiana National Guard, deployed to Iraq in 2004-05, joined Border Patrol in 2007, then ICE in 2015. He lives in a Minneapolis suburb with his wife and children. Six months before this shooting, he was dragged about 100 yards by a fleeing vehicle during an arrest, suffering injuries that required 33 stitches.

Good was 37, a mother of three. Her youngest was just six, a child she dropped off at school that morning in the Honda Pilot that would end up struck with bullets, with her unharmed family dog in the backseat. She grew up in Colorado, lived in Kansas City, moved to Minneapolis. She was a writer with an English degree from Old Dominion University.

They never needed to meet this way.

Had Ross not returned to work after that traumatic June incident, had he not been deployed for heightened enforcement, he wouldn’t have even been in that neighborhood.

Had Good not responded to neighbors’ whistles alerting her to ICE’s presence, had she not positioned her car in the street to observe, we might never know her name.

Both were US citizens. Both have advocates now insisting they acted rightly. Both were called terrorists and murderers within hours.

Rhetoric Changes, Law Doesn’t

President Trump came to office promising the largest mass deportation ever.

He’s deployed harsh language, violent videos, and unusual offshore prisons. Yet he is, at best, a conflicted messenger: His companies have employed undocumented immigrants, he’s married to an immigrant, and some independent analysis despite the rhetoric puts his first-year deportations below Obama’s annual average.

Obama used much more careful rhetoric, spoke protectively of immigrants and the American dream. Dreamers gained protections from the administration. The law itself never changed, though, and thus the administration never created a fully secured legal path to citizenship for those who’d been here since childhood. Our immigration laws remain essentially what they were when Ross, Good, and I were children. Even as deportations under President Obama were quite high, illegal immigration ticked upwards.

In 1986, it was President Ronald Reagan who signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, granting amnesty to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. People were living in the shadows without papers when Ross, Good, and I were born.

Since then, immigration has been a wedge issue to motivate voters, never a problem Congress actually solves. Generations live in limbo as congressional majorities shift.

Caught Between Administrations

Ross joined ICE in 2015, when I left the White House. I can only imagine what this decade has been like, working for an agency whipsawed between administrations.

Trump’s ICE, Biden’s ICE, Trump’s ICE again.

Different rhetoric, same law. And after June, after being dragged around 100 yards and nearly killed by someone using a car as a weapon? I can only imagine Ross’ state of mind must have been altered.

Good was acting as a legal observer that morning. Video shows her smiling at Ross through her car window: “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Then her vehicle moved. Then shots through the windshield.

Right-wing media sees an agent who feared for his life, a man recently traumatized by a car used as a weapon. Left-wing media sees a mother murdered while driving away, not toward. Fox viewers see only Ross’s humanity on display. MSNow viewers see only Good’s.

What Actually Changes

I spent years in an administration that on paper wanted to change the law.

We didn’t, not because we didn’t care. Congress didn’t act. The DREAM Act passed the House in 2010 but failed in the Senate, falling five votes short of the sixty needed. Other legislative fights consumed our focus. Maybe we should have pushed harder. Maybe we couldn’t have succeeded anyway.

That same playbook happened in the last administration. So close to bipartisan reform, and no action.

Now I watch politicians act as if this is straightforward. That we can thrive economically without immigrants, though that’s not how America was built. Or that objecting to enforcement, without changing the law, protects anyone. It doesn’t.

And that’s what makes me so sad about the violence last week. This tragedy won’t change anything in the near term. Unless voters force the issue this November. Unless we demand Congress finally act on immigration reform instead of using it to win elections.

At the root of the debate, the law needs to evolve constantly to keep up with the need. Laws always need to change to reflect the times and they haven’t. Ross and Good couldn’t do that on that street that day. Neither of them, with a whistle or a gun, could have changed the law.

I’d just finished reading Marjorie Taylor Greene’s exit interview with The New York Times, where, with some prescience, she predicted that with President Trump flailing at home, there would be more foreign engagements and war ahead.

The one thing MTG and I agreed on became reality.

In a dramatic midnight raid, American forces seized Nicolás Maduro, ending his corrupt grip on Venezuela.

Maduro was a bad man, loathed by many people in Venezuela and despised by the country’s expat community. He suppressed dissent, rigged elections and grifted while his people wallowed in poverty.

But what happens now? What’s the plan?

In the morning after and the days since, there’s no evidence of a fully baked plan.

The Maduro Problem

I first met Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, at the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, when I led President Obama’s press advance. Chávez was pure theater, traveling with his own self-appointed paparazzi, handing Obama a book on governance in view of his own photographer, disrupting multilateral meetings with his own “journalists” literally storming in and fighting with the American press.

All show, no substance.

Chávez promised Venezuelans the moon and delivered corruption. Maduro inherited the playbook and perfected the grift. His wife, Cilia Flores, whom he married in 2013, allegedly installed more than 40 unqualified hires including many of her own family members in government positions.

Socialism in name only. Kleptocracy in practice.

My Venezuelan friends describe two distinct countries: Before Chávez and after. Venezuelans risked everything and voted overwhelmingly to remove Maduro. Still he wouldn’t go. Regardless of Trump’s plans or lack thereof it’s important to understand that for many Venezuelans Maduro’s removal is cause for celebration.

In the U.S., I have friends with family members in limbo, paying close attention to Trump’s terminations of Biden-era Venezuelan Temporary Protected Status. Most would welcome a strong Venezuela that allows them to return safely. Is that what we’ll get?

The Americas Blind Spot

As a product of U.S. public schools, I learned almost everything about Western Europe and very little about Latin American government or systems.

At the Summit of Americas I gained a new perspective. Leader after leader stood up with barely concealed resentment toward the United States. I remember Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, dressed in what he calls his revolutionary uniform, being particularly vocal.

Distance cuts both ways. While we ignored Latin America, China moved in. While we lectured about democracy, authoritarian regimes flourished across the region.

It’s different for someone like Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

He’s from the region. His family fled Castro’s Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. Rubio knows what oppressive regimes do to people. I know he wants better. But even on Sunday morning shows, he seemed as clear as mud about who’s actually running Venezuela now, and what actually is the plan for the region. If the Secretary of State can’t articulate the plan, what exactly are we doing?

I saw an old clip circulating this weekend of Hollywood making the case for the US to pay close attention to Venezuela, which now entertains delegations from Iran, China, Russia, because it is so close to the U.S. That same proximity matters if this goes south.

What Comes Next

Things can go south, very quickly, without a plan. And Americans have very recent history with swift, seemingly successful invasions followed by long engagements without a clear endgame.

We know the operation to remove Maduro involved hundreds of Special Operations forces, reportedly more than 100 aircraft and thousands of troops in the region. Deployment costs alone run tens of millions per day. Our 20 year involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan cost more than $8 trillion and counting. Venezuela won’t be Iraq, the administration insists. But what will it be?

In Trump’s press conference the day after the raid, the only thing he made clear was his belief that it’s “America First” for the U.S. to run Venezuela.

How? How long? At what cost? Would Congress even authorize this?

After two decades in the Middle East, after Afghanistan, I don’t think Americans’ appetite for foreign entanglements has changed.

I joined a group of conservatives and progressives after the 2024 election and one of the topics that came up was Venezuela and our escalating “war on drugs.” I wondered openly what a war in our own hemisphere would look like.

We might yet find out.

The Leadership Vacuum

María Corina Machado, the opposition leader many Venezuelans actually support, seemed prepared to enter the country after Maduro’s capture. Then President Trump said he didn’t think she had the support. She’s been making her case on Fox News, interviewing with Sean Hannity, just last night she said to him she’d be willing to give President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize she recently won. She also warned that Maduro’s Vice President is no better, and instead continues to jail journalists (though I’m not sure that will swing Trump’s support).

My guess is that behind the scenes she’s likely been trying to talk to Rubio. Because it’s entirely unclear who is running Venezuela now.

Is it the U.S.? The Vice President who worked alongside Maduro? Machado — who has spoken favorably about President Trump, but received the Nobel Prize that Trump wanted? Hannity also on Fox News mentioned that Stephen Miller would have a larger role in running Venezuela?

The whole thing makes me think of a movie (that probably isn’t worth your time) that I watched last year, Moutainhead, about exceedingly wealthy tech guys trying to figure out which of them would go run a foreign nation. The poorest, they decided. It would be laughable if it weren’t so consequential.

I wish we had an actual plan to lean into the Americas. A plan that helped business (fair, transparent and regulated business) flourish. A plan for clean government, no deals with China and access to capital in the Western hemisphere.

I’m not sure that’s what we’ll get.

What Democrats Should Do

What should Democrats do? Start with clarity. Not paragraphs. Not twelve-point plans. Simple words:

What Trump just did is risky, costly, and half-baked.

That’s it. Say it clearly. Repeat it. Then demand answers to basic questions. Like: How does this end? There is no way the Republicans would have let a Democratic administration walk into an entanglement like this without demanding answers. And President Trump alone made this decision, took this action.

There are long-term costs beyond the price tag, like our country’s reputation in a region that already views us with suspicion. There’s a cost when resentment builds, when our standing diminishes, when we raise new questions with no clear answers.

I hope this works out for Venezuela. I hope this risky engagement works out for America, and doesn’t join a long list of American misadventures in nation building. (Especially when Americans have been so clear they want the focus here at home).

I hope Venezuelans get the country they voted for and deserve. But hope isn’t a strategy. I think I have some experience with that.

It’s nearly Christmas, and I’m thinking about the year ahead rather than the one behind us.

Not because 2025 wasn’t significant, it certainly was. The second Trump term began. Political violence claimed lives, including Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette survived an assassination attempt the same night as the Hortmans’ murders. Despite it all, the rhetoric seems to have gotten nastier. The divides somehow felt deeper.

What I’ve been thinking about as I watch the pundits close out their year-end shows: We’ve all convinced ourselves that one man — whether we love him or hate him — holds the keys to our future. I spent eight years watching Barack Obama up close. I saw what a President can and cannot do. And I’ve spent the years since watching Americans invest far too much hope and far too much blame in the one person sitting in the Oval Office.

The truth? We’ve got to look a bit deeper. All of us.

When we’re honest with ourselves we can see that sometimes we are the problem. We are the reason we get stuck. Even if we don’t know it. When we think about our own rhetoric, our own certitude, our own unwillingness to listen. We’re all plowing forward, and exhausting ourselves. By taking everything so seriously, by treating every political moment like an existential crisis, by turning against each other over disagreements that, in the grand scheme, matter far less than we pretend. We think we are being vigilant, holding our ground, but sometimes we are just creating walls.

Kids Know Something We’ve Forgotten

A personal story: My son borrowed my phone yesterday to play music while I drove him and his friend around. He went on my Instagram and started liking and resharing random posts from my account. Some of them were political. He was trolling.

I wasn’t thrilled. Then I watched him laughing at it all, the politics, the posts, the seriousness of it all. And I realized: Maybe that’s the sanity we’ve lost. Kids have always been the ones I look to for guidance. It’s not always that serious. And it shouldn’t be, because when it is, we block out possibilities we barely know exist.

The Blessing of Stepping Back

Which brings me to some personal news.

For years, my husband and I decided we had one child and we were content. We didn’t want the stress of trying for another. We love the son we have. When I took a step back from the chaos, though, when I left the CEO role and surrounded myself with less stress something truly unexpected happened. When I stopped treating every moment like a crisis, I found a blessing I didn’t know was still possible.

In very early May 2026 (or thereabouts), we’ll welcome another son.

My first arrived during the Obama administration. This one gets a Trump account. (More on that another time.)

There is nothing — and I mean nothing — more important than this. Not the hot takes. Not the outrage cycles. Not the certainty that we’re right and they’re wrong. What matters is what we build. Who we love. The futures we create. The community we build, however it is we build it.

What We’re Building

As Christmas arrives, I’m remembering how lucky we are.

Lucky to live in a country where we have the freedom to build families, to raise children, to hope for better. To make the better days happen. Lucky that the solutions to our problems don’t rest with one man in Washington, but with all of us — if we choose to step up.

I’m looking forward to 2026. Predictions to come. But not next week. Next week, I’ll be taking time off to enjoy my family. I hope you do the same.

Merry Christmas. See you in the new year.

Read that again.

The President of the United States suggested a murdered man was responsible for his own death because he criticized Trump too much. When reporters asked if he stood by these comments, Trump doubled down on camera: “He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned... I thought he was very bad for our country.”

I’m grateful Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned it: “Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed at the hands of their own son, who reportedly had drug addiction and other issues, and their remaining children are left in serious mourning and heartbreak. This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”

But thinking back to my previous comments, when you’ve lost Marjorie Taylor Greene (someone who herself has said some pretty questionable things), you’ve gone somewhere dark.

If you’re worried about the temperature in this country, look no further than the President, who is leading by example and unable to comment on a tragic, grisly murder without turning it into a post about his political opponents. They hadn’t even made an arrest yet.

Meeting the Reiners

Years ago, Rob Reiner hosted a book party for Pat Cunnane, my wonderful colleague from the Obama White House, at their home. I met both Rob and Michele; I saw them again at another friend’s house. She was warm, eager to talk about motherhood and kids. He was passionate about causes (and quite outspoken in his views on Trump, it must be said). Rob and I disagreed about the Equal Rights Amendment, which I thought we needed to push for in the aftermath of Trump’s first election. He thought it had no path.

Now they’re gone.

And instead of a conversation about the epidemic destroying families across America – drug addiction, mental health crises, the systems that fail parents before violence erupts – we’re debating whether a President should mock a murdered man who can’t defend himself. As if the answer to that question isn’t obvious.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September, there was a vanishingly brief moment when both sides condemned political violence. When we didn’t retreat to our corners. We called out heinous statements. Then the news cycle moved on. We never had a real reflection about why our discourse has become so toxic that people have taken to violence.

The circumstances of the Reiners’ murder are very different. And yet here we are again. Not mourning the dead but debating the politics of it.

Once again, we’re missing the point. This isn’t a story about a political opponent. It’s personal. It’s a 32-year-old man with a long history of addiction allegedly killing his parents. It’s a story too many American families know. And we’re wasting it on Trump’s ego.

The Bird with the Broken Wing

I know this story. Not from Hollywood, from my own family. Not a left-leaning family – my right-leaning family. We’ve been affected by a family member with drug addiction. Someone whose actions you could never predict. Someone who was unstable and you always worried about. Many tried to help, only to fail.

Even young I always wondered what the tragedy would be to end it.

In our case, it was an overdose in a basement. While his children will forever wear scars, that night only he would die. But when you’ve had that experience, you worry about the worst – something like what happened to the Reiners. Anyone who knows an addict knows that things can spiral unpredictably.

At my family member’s funeral, my grandmother spoke eloquently about trying to watch a bird with a broken wing try to fly. Families try everything, often without success, to find the child they once knew.

The Reiners made a movie about this in 2015. “Being Charlie,” directed by Rob and co-written by Nick Reiner, based on his own experiences with addiction and homelessness, which follows a son spiraling and parents struggling, sometimes too distracted in their own lives. In the 2015 film I saw a father keep his distance, believing that professionals could help. From the interviews around that movie it seemed they thought they were on a positive trajectory. But those of us who know addiction know the story is rarely over.

I have no idea what transpired in the decade since. But I imagine there was pain. There was love. There were efforts that didn’t work. And now there are surviving children left to process that their brother allegedly killed their parents.

The majority of murders are committed by someone the victim knows. This isn’t a political story. It’s a public health crisis playing out in private homes across America, regardless of wealth or fame or politics.

The Conversation We’re Not Having

As the media seizes on every gruesome detail of the Reiner tragedy and Trump’s awful comments we seem to miss that fragile people are involved. Headlines read “Rob Reiner’s son arrested,” as if Michele wasn’t equally his parent, equally his victim. Stories breathlessly report Rob and his son were fighting at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party, all based on gossip. I can’t imagine the family having to read these stories.

Why can’t we stop ourselves from wallowing in the gruesome and political?

Last week I wrote about how raising kids, the toughest job, the one with the biggest impact on our lives, is undervalued. So many struggle through. Too many with a child facing addiction. And when tragedy strikes, instead of asking how we prevent the next one, how we help those in need, we turn it into a spectacle.

What we should be discussing:

Why is it so many in our country are turning to drugs? How do we identify families in crisis before violence occurs? What support systems exist for parents when their child battles addiction? Is our criminal justice system equipped to handle mental health and substance abuse, or does it fail families until it’s too late? Why do we only talk about these issues after the body count?

Rob and Michele Reiner deserved better than to become a political football. Their surviving children who are grappling both with a mentally ill brother and the loss of their parents deserve better than watching their family tragedy weaponized by a president settling scores with a dead critic. And we deserve better than this moment.

We missed the conversation after Charlie Kirk’s death. We’re missing it now. Until we can move past our political obsessions and confront the crises destroying too many families – addiction, mental health, violence, systems that fail us – we’ll keep missing it.

That’s the real tragedy.

I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

Corporate America might, as the report claims, be at risk of rolling back progress for women. But it (and the reporting on it) get something fundamental wrong: You can’t backslide from a place you’ve never fully occupied.

The Math That Doesn’t Add Up

I know something about the numbers that don’t work.

I was in the White House when I had my first child. Seven weeks later, I was in Afghanistan serving the President. I was traveling constantly until my son was three. “Mommy, I miss you,” he said. I missed him more. The asks of women are steep. The asks women make of themselves are steeper still. Stories like mine are not data points that will show up in an annual survey conducted by management consultants, but they give a much more complete picture than the data alone.

Let’s also be clear about what we’re measuring. Or maybe more specifically the system we’re measuring.

The early promise of the women’s movement was equal opportunity in a structure built entirely by and for men. Women couldn’t open bank accounts without male permission. Couldn’t start businesses. Couldn’t earn equally even when they outperformed. Progress meant fighting for access to a game with rules we didn’t write.

Some of the more retrograde things that used to hold women back are, thankfully, gone. Don’t mistake that for an equal paying field.

The Stories We Don’t Tell

I know a woman in Silicon Valley who, after losing her husband and children to a drunk driver, threw herself into work to survive the grief.

She brought in massive revenue, then brought the data proving she’d out-earned her male counterparts in revenue, even while being paid less. She was brushed aside. The quiet bonus check came later: Recognition without admission. (My guess is that it was still not equal work for equal pay).

Every high-achieving woman I know has a story like this.

This week, I’m in Florida visiting my grandmother. After helping build a Pizza Hut franchise with five young children, her husband died of a heart attack. She was left with impossible choices. She could lean into business she’d helped build but now had to singularly run. Or she could focus on children who were grieving and needed her more than ever.

I don’t know how she did it.

Then there’s my mother. When people say “my mom didn’t work,” I think of her. Raising children is exhausting, all-consuming work with demanding bosses who become your most important legacy. It’s a full-time job our society systematically undervalues. And when it’s done right, it is indeed the most important job in our society. Kids raised right go on to add significant value to our world.

What We’re Actually Measuring

Getting back to the McKinsey report. It suggests that flexible work arrangements are forcing women into difficult choices. Without ways to contribute that actually work for them, with employers admitting these contributions aren’t valued equally, the outlook is bleak.

But what if the premise is wrong?

After the White House, I was an executive at a publicly traded company, then CEO of a company I helped build, a network contributor flying weekly to be on air five days a month. Peak performance by every traditional measure.

But happiness?

My son hated when I was gone. He wanted both his parents around. I was frustrated that in this society we both birth and help build, we never get full credit for constructing, and we don’t have an equal hand in regulating.

Leaning Smart, Not Just In

Last year I stepped back.

Not because I lost ambition. Because I realized what it’s worth. You get one shot at parenting. Get that wrong, and what’s the point? I have done incredible things in my life, things I didn’t dream I could do as a kid. I helped elect the first Black president of the United States. I traveled in Marine helicopters to Buckingham Place. I stood in Nelson Mandela’s prison cell contemplating how one truly fights for equality. The most important thing I’ve done in my life is having my child.

Realizing that, and the importance of focusing on the next generation, is not losing ambition. It’s seeing clearly that you’re playing a game designed without your needs in mind.

There’s this exhausting debate that comes through in this Axios write up separating “trad wives” from “liberal moms” that I find deeply insincere. Women contribute in every way, and I appreciate very much women’ s perspectives of all backgrounds. I did read that Erika Kirk recently said single women were drawn to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to replace a husband, and I had to laugh: we can’t expect any man to singularly provide free community buses and universal childcare. But we do need men in the conversation about raising better humans. On that we will agree. I for one would welcome having a conversation with Erika Kirk or anyone else to bring about a better world for both women and children.

Sitting here with my grandmother, thinking about the choices she made that weren’t always hers to make (she had other people to think about), I think this report has it backwards. Women on the right and left are both asking for the same thing: systems change.

We can’t backslide from what we never had. The quiet promise isn’t in women changing. It’s in demanding the systems change. Call it what you will.

I call it leaning smart instead of leaning in. And right now, we’re measuring women’s progress by how well we conform to structures that were never built for us.

That’s not backsliding. That’s finally being honest about what needs to break.

In politics and often in business, there’s always an emergency that demands immediate attention. We’re conditioned to believe that stepping away, even briefly, means abandoning our responsibility to change and progress.

It took me a long time to realize that’s just not true. You can step back and that doesn’t mean you don’t care.

This past week, my best friend from Galesburg and I spent the holiday enjoying each other and our families. We went on walks, played games. Only occasionally conversation drifted to the weight of the world’s problems pressing down on us. (I mean, dinner conversation did include a discussion of nuclear war — the odds of it, where you’d be safest if one hit, and the likelihood of survival. It would seem our hometown of Galesburg is safer than most.)

Stepping back clarified something: Sometimes the most urgent thing isn’t the next political battle. It’s realizing we only have so much time with the people we love, and we don’t always know when that time will end.

Precious Time

Early in Thanksgiving week, we had a loss in my husband’s family. A family member, not much older than me, taken too soon by cancer.

Soon after we learned about another tragedy: U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, was shot and killed in Washington D.C. on National Guard duty. She was just 20 years old. The circumstances of her death — she appears to have been killed by an Afghan soldier who had worked with the CIA — reveal layers of heartbreak and the complex aftermath of our foreign engagements.

At its core, though, her murder for me is another reminder of the preciousness of time.

Just 20 years old. I think about Specialist Beckstrom and her family and how much time they thought they had.

The holidays can be stress-filled. They are often a time when checking things off a list seems more important, sometimes, than enjoying the moment. Getting things done before the new year, making sure everything is ready or perfect. But in that we might look back and realize we wish we had been more present in the moment.

For all of those who can, I hope we’ll set aside political distractions best we can as we near the holidays. Those in the White House and Congress should be able to handle their jobs. If they can’t, we should make changes next year and beyond. But constant urgency isn’t sustainable and honestly isn’t healthy. Sometimes it’s simply a waste of time.

Politics Can Wait

It’s less than a year until the midterms. I write in this space about politics almost every week, and I know how important these elections will be.

I’m already seeing leaders stand up, new candidates enter races, the political climate shifting. There are serious issues we need to debate like whether we’re prepared for potential conflict in our hemisphere, how we engage with the world, whether we can grow the economy while lowering consumer prices, how Americans can access affordable housing, healthcare and education. The President today previewed what he said next year will be the greatest economy and I plan to hold him to that.

I’m happy to see Congress stand up as a separate branch and question the White House. I’m happy to see more independence from elected officials whose job it is to represent their constituents, not side with a political party.

Here’s the thing, though. Most of that we can’t control at dinner tables with friends and family. Insults rarely produce allies. Arguments produce fewer converts than you might think. What matters more is building the time and space for genuine connection.

Making Space for Connection

Some ideas for creating that space: We played “Beat the Parents” with the kids over Thanksgiving week, a trivia game that works across ages. The kids were so into it they wanted overtime. You literally had to put stakes on the game. (Our youngest participant was definitely up for doing the laundry, though I’m not sure how that would have gone).

My family watched “The Chair Company,” a show about conspiracy theories and unexpected twists that had us laughing and reminded us that maybe at work, one should focus on work. And when at home, focus on family. We’ve also been watching “Pluribus,” a science fiction show about hive minds, happiness and loneliness that sent us down rabbit holes during car rides listening to follow up podcast discussions.

Our friends driving home listened to “This American Life,” and told us before the drive about an episode where a teacher had a classroom of students shake a box and predict what was in it, only to tell the students they weren’t going to reveal the contents because sometimes in life you won’t know what’s in the box. It’s very true.

December and What Matters

I have a hard time believing we’re already in December.

It’s been a year of political ups and downs, and we’ll soon close it out.

My hope is that post-Thanksgiving, we remember December is a month to appreciate our loved ones and those who make us who we are.

That’s why I’ll be with my grandmother this next week, listening to her stories and enjoying time with my father, who has been caring for her. That’s why I’ll come home to help my husband and son make our annual bread (my grandmother’s tradition) for all of my son’s teachers. And that’s why we’re looking forward to making new memories together this holiday season.

Sometimes the most important political act is simply being present for the people we love.

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*Programming Note: Tomorrow I’m joining Michael Cohen, host of the “Mea Culpa” podcast and a non-resident senior fellow at Tufts University and Brian Rosenwald, Ph.D., author of Talk Radio’s America, for a Substack live about politics. If you are up for it, do tune in. *