ESQUIRE: TWO ARTICLES THAT SHOULD BOTH SCARE, AND DISGUST, ALL AMERICANS WHO STILL CARE ABOUT TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND HONOR- DAVID.

Trump's State of the Union Was a Pantomime of Democracy. We've All Played Our Role. We are stumbling around now in the hall of mirrors. Americans began to relinquish their grip on self-government long before Donald Trump came onto the stage, but the extent to which we have accepted a pantomime democracy is truly astonishing. The president knows the power of the television, the Black Stone of American culture with which he himself is so deeply entranced. He knows that the camera lies, presents just one rectangular crop of the world in fragmented time, and that no other force in our body politic is fast or decisive enough to correct the record. Perception is reality in all the ways that matter. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. The world's most powerful man threatens to triumph over observable reality itself, and too few among us have realized the peril at hand. Read More

Weaponized Sentimentality is a Powerful Tool in Authoritarian Hands Commentary, at this point, would be superfluous. On the night before the Senate was certainly going to acquit him on high crimes of which even some Republicans have admitted he’s guilty, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago delivered his State of the Union address, one of the few constitutional responsibilities of his office that he hasn’t ignored. Which is not to say he hasn’t degraded it, too. On Tuesday night, he turned it into a cheesy spectacle that belonged in, say, a casino sinking into bankruptcy in Atlantic City. Read More