Watching President Joe Biden's farewell address from the Oval Office last night was rather bittersweet. For me at least, it all had a flavor of "what might have been." But in the end, Biden's promised bridge to a new generation of leadership really led nowhere.

While campaigning early in 2020, Biden appeared on a stage with three other prominent Democrats, who were at the time "expected to be considered for the vice presidential nomination" -- Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. Biden said during this campaign event: "Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country." While Biden never actually did explicitly promise to serve only a single term as president, many read his comments to mean exactly that -- Biden would defeat Donald Trump, run a bridging presidency, and then step aside and make way for a younger generation of Democrats to carry the torch forward.

This didn't exactly work out as planned, obviously. As Biden leaves office, the Democratic Party is at this moment almost completely leaderless. There is no one individual the party looks towards as its future. The 2028 presidential primary season is going to be brutal on the Democratic side, as a whole bunch of candidates will vie for the mantle of the party's leadership. Until then, we've got Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both now only minority leaders in their respective chambers of Congress. Neither one is all that well-known to the public at large, and neither one truly speaks for his whole party. There are a number of state governors who long to be seen as the party's true leader, but none of them has really achieved that status at this point.

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Hearings are now underway in the Senate on Donald Trump's various nominees to fill out his administration, but so far it has all felt like it is leading to a very foregone conclusion. American politics has gotten so tribal that Republicans are now willing to overlook just about anything for one of their own, no matter how deeply disqualifying such things would have been in the past. Trump will quite likely get almost all his picks confirmed, no matter what disturbing things exist in their past.

This is more than a little bit depressing, but it is the end result of the Republican Party being remade into a cult of personality with a very flawed Dear Leader at the top. Since Trump has gotten away with so many things himself, how can Republicans say any of it is disqualifying in his choices for his administration? The Republican Party has become completely amoral -- there is no moral line in the sand they are not willing to cross, these days. At least, that's the way it seems, after watching some of the confirmation hearings. If Trump did it (or worse) then how can GOP senators say it is a disqualification for holding office? That's the only moral yardstick (such as it is) that exists for them, anymore. As a measure of how much things have changed in the GOP, just imagine for a moment what John McCain would have had to say about some of the military and national security nominees Trump has come up with. But mavericks like McCain are (for the most part) either gone or have been cowed into silence by the threat of the MAGA crowds backing a primary challenger.

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The debate over transgender athletes has now moved from the campaign trail to the Republican Congress, as the House of Representatives just passed a sweeping ban on transgender girls and women in sports, after Republicans spent an enormous amount of time and money running on the issue in last year's election. But one very important point in this debate is simply not being heard by most people -- the actual scope of the situation. Here is how the Washington Post started its article today on the bill moving through the House:

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Maybe it's time to bring back the concept of adversaries settling their insults with a good old-fashioned duel? That's the thought I have been having while watching the flurry of playground tantrums and unrestrained bullying spewing forth from the highest ranks of MAGA supporters. Maybe Steve Bannon and Elon Musk should just count off ten paces and take potshots at each other -- they could even make it pay-per-view and make a fortune! Well... whomever was left alive might, at any rate.

I am only being semi-facetious here, since it already seems like American society is trending towards stylized legal violence between antagonists anyway. But even without the pistols at dawn, the infighting has already become epic in nature and we haven't even begun -- since there's still a whole week left before Donald Trump gets sworn in.

The core problem, of course, is that people who both feed into and try to emulate Trump have such enormous egos and are so convinced that they are right in absolutely everything that they chafe when they bump up against another MAGA-influencing blowhard who has staked out some contrary position. Neither side will ever back down, and both sides emulate Trump's "all-out attack, all the time" persona, which could easily lead to trouble in Trumpland in all kinds of unforeseeable ways in the very near future. What we're seeing now is just a preview of this unfolding, most likely.

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In an extraordinary confluence of events, America mourned one former president as his body lay in state in the United States Capitol, while another former (and soon-to-be-again) president was sentenced after being found guilty of 34 felonies by a jury. Jimmy Carter had become almost the personification of decency in his post-presidential life, while Donald Trump has always been the personification of something a lot more tawdry.

Trump's sentence didn't actually amount to much. Officially, he was sentenced to "unconditional discharge," which sounds more like an embarrassing medical condition than a legal designation. What it amounts to is the state of New York sternly admonishing Trump by saying: "Tsk, tsk!" while perhaps wagging a disapproving finger at him. Trump will not serve a day in jail, he will not have to pay a penny in fines, and he won't even be subject to probation. None of these options were really available to the judge, since in ten days Trump will become president once again.

But even with the lack of any real punitive judgment against Trump, it will still stain his record. He is the first president to ever be convicted of a felony, and he will also be the first convicted felon to be sworn in as president once again. To use one of his favorite put-downs, this is nothing short of a national disgrace.

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Will TikTok be banned before Donald Trump even takes office? That is the question the Supreme Court will hear tomorrow. As things stand, a law will start to shut down TikTok in this country on the 19th, unless the company divests itself from ownership and control by the Chinese government. Which isn't very likely to happen in the next ten days. But the politics of the situation have been rather convoluted, so it's hard to predict what will happen or what the fallout will be in Washington.

Donald Trump oscillates between fearmongering about the Chinese government (which he always makes a point of calling "the Chinese Communist Party") and playing nice with them in order to cut deals and make money. You never know how he'll come down on any particular issue -- it mostly seems to depend on who has most recently lobbied him to adopt one stance or the other. Recently he's been ripping into China for something that is not actually true (Trump's false claim that the Chinese military are currently running the Panama Canal), but he's also flip-flopped on the TikTok ban once already (from being for a ban to now being against one), so it's anyone's guess how he'll react once he gets into office.

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Two years ago, for Presidents' Day, I wrote the following article in celebration of Jimmy Carter. At the time, he had just entered a hospice to live out his remaining days. He lasted almost two more years, reaching the impressive benchmark of turning 100 years old -- the longest any U.S. president has ever lived, in fact. And as the nation pays its respects to Carter before his final journey home to Plains, Georgia, I thought it was worth running this again. I have no idea if any other American president will ever make it to the century mark, but Carter's real legacy was not just a mark on a calendar, but the mark he made after he left office. And I have serious doubts whether any other former president will ever even get close to matching the good that Jimmy Carter did in his post-presidential career. He truly set the gold standard in that regard. His compassion for his fellow human beings was an inspiration to all, and I will always be grateful for his example of all the good a politician can still do after they leave office.

Originally published February 20, 2023

Former President Jimmy Carter has entered his final days. He has checked in to a hospice to live out his remaining time and, according to an official statement, has refused "additional medical care." So it seemed entirely appropriate to use this year's Presidents' Day to honor him. Carter was an extraordinary man and no matter what opinion you have about his presidency, he has set the absolute gold standard for doing good works as an ex-president -- that much is beyond dispute.

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Donald Trump's "Day One" in office is now less than two weeks away. He promised American voters a lot of action on his first day, but in the past few weeks he seems inordinately focused on some rather odd (one might say: "downright bizarre") goals. He has become a big fan of expanding America in what can only be called imperialistic fashion -- adding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to the American map. Today he floated a new idea, this one not a land-grab but instead of a sort of water-grab: he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," for no particular reason (other than to annoy Mexico, one assumes).

It'd be easy to dismiss all of this as typical Trumpian rambling and bluster -- him getting a bee in his bonnet and then refusing to let it go, no matter how outlandish (pun intended) or impossible the goal. In case anyone's forgotten, this is a routine sort of thing for him. I see it all a little differently, however. I see this all as a monstrous distraction from what he has actually promised he would do, because he is now facing the reality that several of his big promises are going to turn out to be either impossible or incredibly hard to achieve. Perhaps I am wrong -- perhaps it is just Trump's deteriorating mind and his penchant for fleeting monomania about the silliest of ideas. But Trump is the master of distracting the media (and the country as a whole) from any possible bad news which might be blamed in some way on him, so I think this is more of a calculated attempt to toss out lots of red herrings in advance of him actually having to govern once again. Call it a pre-emptive distraction effort.

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Today was a pretty boring day in Washington -- which is as it should be. Congress met and certified the Electoral College votes in the ceremonial finish to last year's presidential election. There were no riots, no protests, and no insurrection attempt by a brigade of sore losers. The Capitol remained peaceful throughout. In fact, the whole thing was so boring that it's really not even worth writing a whole column about it.

Instead, let's focus on what the new Congress has on its plate. With two weeks to go before Donald Trump is sworn into office again, Republicans are already eager to get his second term rolling. The Senate will begin hearings on Trump's cabinet appointees, most of which will be pretty dull and perfunctory -- but a handful of them could get quite lively indeed. Especially considering the fact that Democrats will get to question each of them publicly about anything under the sun. They'll do so to score political points, but also in an effort to convince a few worried Republicans of the candidates' unfitness for office. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, so it will take four of them rejecting any nominee to tank their chances. But most of them will wind up sailing through the process, even if one or two do get derailed.

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Program Note: I must begin today's column with an apology. I had fully intended to write and run this column yesterday, but external events precluded it, and instead I spent all afternoon under the car, performing necessary repairs. It wasn't too bad -- it was 70 degrees outside and not raining (not to rub it in, for those of you actually experiencing winter...) -- but it took all my time and energy for the day, so I was not able to post the annual "banished words" column in a timely manner. My apologies.

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