The Hollowing of American Honor

On partisanship and the Oval Office ambush

It’s hard to believe but the most famous essay James Madison ever wrote was a recycled argument he dashed off in a hurry, lifting most of it from his 1787 essay Vices of the Political System of the United States. And though he flip-flopped on the “Big Republic” idea and later co-founded the precursor to the modern Democratic Party, in Federalist No. 10 he eloquently argued that parties are a fundamental threat to democracy, writing that “an attachment to different leaders” has “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

Nine years later in 1796, George Washington echoed this sentiment in his farewell address, observing that competition between political factions, “sharpened by the spirit of revenge … is itself a frightful despotism.”

Could they have even conceived of a future America where everything is divided along party lines? National tragedies, blockbuster movies, breakfast cereals, biology, mathematics—everything has become politicized through a left or right lens. Making matters worse, often this now boils down to either a woke or MAGA lens.

Loyal readers know me to be fiercely nonpartisan. In fact, I don’t even vote because that would mean taking sides in such a way that would compromise my ability to be objective. I know other journalists who decline to vote for the same reason. And I think it’s important to take a little detour here and reflect on past presidents, not simply to prove my nonpartisan bona fides but also to remind ourselves of what good and bad presidential decisions look like, and how broad the spectrum runs, because even putting aside all his personality issues, Trump is in many ways a good president but also a uniquely bad one.

Take Clinton, for example. I praised the Comeback Kid for his economic achievements, which included the nation’s longest peacetime economic expansion in history, the creation of 22 million jobs, unemployment dropping to a 30-year low of 4%, and a budget surplus for the first time since 1969. But I condemned his reckless military interventions, including his disastrous handling of Somalia and ill-conceived bombing campaign in Serbia.

Or consider Bush, whose President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), launched in 2003, saved an estimated 25 million lives by providing antiretroviral treatment, medical support, and infrastructure improvements in Africa and other affected regions. But he also launched the Iraq War on faulty intelligence, leading to over 200,000 civilian deaths, expanded executive power through the Patriot Act, and normalized torture at CIA black sites.

And what about Obama? Well, I still place his keynote at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, when he introduced himself as a skinny kid with a funny name, and back when his star was rapidly rising though he was not yet even senator of Illinois, in the pantheon of great American speeches, particularly that famous passage that gave me the faith of Morpheus to believe this skinny kid was the One:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states. Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Goddamn, that’s good. I’d go so far as to rank it alongside FDR and JFK’s first inaugural addresses. You know, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and “Ask not what your country can do for you.”

I also think America’s healthcare system is an embarrassment and so I was overjoyed to see Obamacare expand health insurance coverage to over 20 million Americans. I was pretty happy also to read about the SEAL Team 6 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden. But I was out when Barry O’Bomber began pushed unconstitutional executive overreach, particularly on issues like drone strikes against American citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011, or mass surveillance under the NSA. Not to mention his abject failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, setting the stage for future aggression. Or the hand he played in betraying his own keynote, helping carve the nation into black and white Americas by contributing to the rise of woke culture, such as by expanding Title IX protections and how that empowered gender politics on American campuses.

I was critical of both Republican and Democratic complicity in the financial deregulation that led to the 2008 economic collapse, from Reagan’s embrace of Wall Street deregulation to Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall to Bush’s catastrophic mismanagement of the subprime mortgage crisis. I’ve defended conservatives like Jordan Peterson when Canadian authorities tried to censor him, and liberals like Matt Taibbi when the U.S. government tried to discredit him for reporting on the Twitter Files. I condemned DeSantis for using government power against Disney just as I condemned New York’s legal attacks on the NRA.

Hopefully that’s enough throat-clearing to come around at last to Donald Trump, who has broken more brains on both sides than any other president in American history. Democrats are presenting with a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome when they can’t acknowledge the incredible success of Operation Warp Speed, which led to the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, or the moral victory of the First Step Act, reducing mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders and allowing for the early release for thousands of federal prisoners, policies that have disproportionately ruined the lives of far too many black men in this country.

On the other hand, I’ve criticized Trump for his racist dog-whistling, such as when DHS released a statement in 2018 that began “We must secure…” and contained exactly 14 words. Yeah, not a coincidence. But I’ve also attacked his critics for accusing him of racist dog-whistling when it didn’t apply, most infamously when he said “very fine people on both sides” and half the nation immediately contracted TDS, turning this simple phrase and the way folks interpret it into an IQ test of sorts.

I condemned his disqualifying attempts to overturn the 2020 election, just as I condemned Biden’s disqualifying refusal to accept his own cognitive decline.

Then we get to foreign policy, and my stance here has been just as consistent. I supported arming Ukraine against Russia and Israel’s war against Hamas, but I also opposed America’s endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when both parties were pushing them. I criticized Obama for drawing a red line in Syria he never enforced, and I criticized Trump for dishonorably abandoning Kurdish allies in Syria after they fought ISIS on America’s behalf.

I’ve also condemned Trump’s open admiration for dictators such as Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, which I find utterly repulsive, but even when this penchant was at its most absurd, as he was talking about writing “love letters” to Kim Jong-un, I kept an open mind. As the former U.S. correspondent for NK News, the world’s leading news outlet on North Korea, and a former analyst of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, I was one of the earliest in the field to openly express optimism over the fact that, after decades of hostility between the United States and North Korea, characterized by nuclear threats and diplomatic stalemates, Trump achieved a historic breakthrough by bringing KJU to the negotiating table. The Singapore and Hanoi summits both ended with denuclearization agreements, and not long after, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korea. Not bad.

The world of North Korean journos and politicos tilts decidedly left and precious few of my colleagues were willing to see the potential value in sitting down with a sociopathic dictator who routinely fires ICBMs into the Sea of Japan, pissing off two of the most powerful militaries on the planet, those of South Korea and Japan. Trump proved willing to flush diplomatic protocols in the simple belief that “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” And it worked, for a while. He opened channels of communication, reduced immediate tensions, suspended joint military exercises, and secured the release of three American hostages. But despite initial progress, talks stalled as North Korea refused to make substantial nuclear concessions without total sanctions relief, no formal agreement on denuclearization was ever reached, and Trump’s antics ultimately allowed North Korea time to advance its arsenal, which it did even as these diplomatic steps were underway. So yeah, he took a big swing. But he also whiffed really fucking hard.

Trump was creative enough to ignore the so-called experts, think outside the box, and get KJU to the table. But he was too arrogant to listen those same experts when they correctly warned him KJU could not be trusted, or that any deal made would not be worth the paper it was printed on. You see, it’s one thing to ignore policy wonks who seem lost in the swamp of the way things have always been done, but it’s quite another to cast aside any consideration of the realities on the ground, historical precedent, or the long-term consequences of a given deal.

That’s the problem I have with Trump. He’s the day trader of U.S. politics because he deploys short-term, high-yield strategies that could be revolutionary if successful, but absolutely disastrous if not. And like a late buyer to a pump-and-dump of penny stocks, he often gets burned because he doesn’t understand the risks—and won’t allow himself to be educated on them either because, after all, he’s the smartest man in the world and he knows better than anybody.

So yeah, we may have narrowly avoided a nuclear holocaust in East Asia and compromised the security of everyone in the Valeriepieris circle, but the White House made some cool commemorative coins with Trump’s big head on them and there was a lot of cheap talk about a Nobel Prize. Cool cool.

This brings me all way to this week’s news, and the disgraceful display we saw in the White House. Trump and Vance have made their stance on Ukraine painfully clear. They stupidly see Zelenskyy not as a leader fighting for his country’s survival, but as an ungrateful inconvenience. Trump has mocked him, and Vance has openly said he doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. Is he so ignorant he believes the isolationist fantasy that if we just ignore Russia’s invasion, it’ll all go away? Or does he literally not care about Ukrainians suffering genocidal violence? Or, worse, as is the case with many Trump supporters whose brains have been fried by TDS—yes, TDS works both ways—does he deny genocidal violence is even taking place or that Russia’s intentions there are genocidal in nature at all?

I mean, it doesn’t really matter. But it was truly gross to see Trump and Vance ambush our own ally like this. Zelenskyy calmly and even somewhat sheepishly pointed out the simple fact that Ukraine has already tried a ceasefire with Russia, and it only gave Putin time to kill more Ukrainians—and that’s when Vance attacked him. So this whole narrative about Zelenskyy being disrespectful is total bullshit, and another excellent reminder why we need to be able to congratulate Trump on his successes without feeling the need to defend every goddamn thing he does, such as spitting in the face of a war-weary man fighting to keep his people alive—undoubtedly, in no small part because Zelenskyy wouldn’t bend the knee when Trump tried to extort him and was impeached for it.

And what exactly is the play here, anyway? Trump and Vance berated Zelenskyy for not wanting peace, but what is this blinkered stupidity they’re offering instead? Did Trump learn nothing from dealing with North Korea? Or was the lesson he took from that failure something like, real diplomacy has never been tried before?

Because, of course, capitulation is always an option. Another ceasefire, giving Putin more time to kill more Ukrainians and take more territory is, of course, always an option. Hell, maybe we should’ve tried it in WWII—just handed Poland to Hitler, patted ourselves on the back, and hoped for the best. Worked out great for Neville Chamberlain, right?

What the hell was wrong with Churchill anyway, who so foolishly declared:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

What, didn’t this spoiled Spencer value peace? I mean, we’ve given Ukraine $175 billion in emergency funding since 2022, but after adjusting for inflation, under the Lend-Lease program during World War II, we gave the UK $476 billion. And to paraphrase Vance, did Churchill say thank you once? Well, we were never so disgustingly petty as to care. There was a time, to use the Beckettian phrase, there was a time, when we really were more noble than that, and held our heads high, and like that scene at the end of Batman Begins, when Commissioner Gordon says, “I never said thank you.” Batman doesn’t reply, “Yeah bitch, you better say thank you!”

He says, “And you’ll never have to.” Because he’s not a petty narcissist who’s in it for gratitude. He’s a hero. And once upon a time, America stood on the rooftop with its old colonial oppressor, in the aftermath of saving their asses, and had the noble poise not to gloat or demand deference, but to save Europe, and the West, and expect no thank you for it, nor want any, because we were heroes once, truly.

For all his flaws and corruption, Zelenskyy, who stayed in Kyiv under Russian bombardment, embodies the kind of wartime leadership that history remembers. Trump, meanwhile, who hid in a White House bunker when protesters showed up, and Vance, who once despised Trump before groveling for his approval, not so much.

I always knew my area of greatest concern with this presidency would be foreign policy, specifically Russia and China. Trump is good on Israel, but he doesn’t seem to apply the same principles to Ukraine. So while I have extended all the benefit of the doubt possible to this new administration, and was hopeful in particular to see Trump take a sledgehammer to gender ideology, “anti-racist” racism, and trans literalism, the balloon has finally popped. The United States is not a penny stock, though we seem to have elected ourselves a penny president.

What happened this week in the Oval Office was a total disgrace, even if you think a Zelenskyy is a total loser, and you don’t have to be anti-Trump to see that.