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Share The Warning with Steve Schmidt

The dignity of the United States is real.

It resides in the power of its institutions, the authority of its laws and the respect commanded by those who represent the American people abroad.

When an American member of Congress travels on official business, he carries more than a title. He carries the constitutional authority of the United States.

That authority was treated with contempt in the West Bank.

Congressman was confronted and detained at gunpoint for hours by violent Israeli settlers while conducting an official investigative visit. Israeli soldiers stood by with an indifference that conveyed something deeply troubling: that the intimidation of an American congressman was a trifling matter.

It was an affront to the dignity of the United States.

Every American should be enraged by it.

Ro Khanna is one of the finest members of Congress.

He’s an iconoclast in a sea of sock puppets and generic mediocrities. He’s principled, effective, intellectually independent and courageous.

I admire and respect him greatly.

One of the reasons I do is because we disagree on important matters.

Respectful disagreement between serious people is one of the great virtues of democratic life. It tests assumptions, sharpens arguments and enlarges understanding. A person can leave such an exchange more certain of his principles, more aware of their limits, and more respectful of the person sitting across from him.

That has been my experience with Ro Khanna.

He thinks for himself.

He speaks plainly.

He acts from conviction.

Washington has produced too few men and women of his character. If there were more of them beneath the Capitol Dome, the country would be stronger, its politics would be healthier, and the American people would be better served.

What happened to him in the West Bank demands the strongest condemnation.

The violent settler movement has become a source of terror, lawlessness and disgrace.

Its extremists attack Palestinian civilians, seize land, destroy homes and spread fear under the protection or indifference of authorities who possess the power to stop them.

Their conduct is barbaric.

Their ideology is fanatical.

Their contempt for law and human life places them on the opposite side of the same coin as violent Palestinian terrorists.

The causes they invoke are different.

The methods reveal the same moral corruption.

Both sanctify grievance.

Both glorify domination.

Both regard innocent people as instruments.

Both make peace more distant and bloodshed more certain.

Israel has every right to defend itself from terrorism.

Palestinians possess the same human right to live free from terror, humiliation and violence.

The Netanyahu government has failed that test.

Its alliance with extremists has damaged Israel’s democracy, weakened its standing, and inflicted tremendous harm upon the United States.

America has invested billions of dollars each year in Israel’s security. It has supplied weapons, diplomatic protection and strategic support. It has stood with Israel through war, terrorism and isolation.

That friendship carries obligations.

Israel must respect the United States.

It must respect its institutions.

It must respect the elected representatives of the American people.

An armed extremist who points a weapon at a United States congressman conducting official business challenges more than one man. He challenges the authority of the country that sent him.

The soldiers who tolerated it dishonored the alliance.

The government that permits such forces to flourish damages the friendship upon which it increasingly depends.

Israel needs its American friends.

It needs them now more than ever.

Friendship, however, requires candor. Loyalty requires judgment. Respect requires reciprocity.

The United States must speak clearly.

What happened to Ro Khanna was intolerable.

The violent settlers responsible should be identified and held accountable.

The conduct of the Israeli soldiers present should be investigated.

The Israeli government should provide a full explanation and a formal apology to Congressman Khanna and to the United States.

American dignity requires a response proportionate to the offense.

Ro Khanna went to the West Bank to see, listen and investigate.

He did his duty.

He represented his country with seriousness and courage.

His country must now defend the dignity of his office and the authority of the United States.

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Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, first elected to office in 1975, who believes himself to be a political genius, recruited the 80-year-old governor of Maine to run against the 79-year-old MAGA incumbent, while a group of silver spoon leftists recruited a prep school oysterman with a giant SS Nazi Totenkopf tattooed on his chest for the job.

Do you know these names?

Jamie Davis. A Louisiana farmer.

Scott Colom. A Mississippi prosecutor.

Dr. Annie Andrews. A South Carolina pediatrician. (If you missed my conversation with her last week, here it is. Hope you’ll listen to what she has to say.)

Seth Bodnar. A Green Beret who graduated from West Point, became a Rhodes Scholar, and went on to lead the University of Montana.

Each is an exceptional individual and a person of the highest character.

Each has a proven track record.

Each has courage, determination and integrity.

Three are Democrats, and one is an independent (Bodnar).

Two are black, one is a woman, and one is a Green Beret combat veteran, who graduated first in his class at West Point.

Each of them is in a winnable race. They deserve the support of the Democratic National Committee and the adjacent party committees.

This is a perfect illustration about the importance of the suppressed DNC autopsy report of which there are functionally two parts. One is about politics, and the other is about forensic accounting.

It’s estimated that between $5 billion and $8 billion dollars will be spent on Democratic candidates by Democratic donors in the 2026 cycle. The notion that the people who are charged with the fiduciary responsibility that comes with running the Democratic Party can credibly claim they don’t have the resources to adequately fund US Senate races in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Montana is ridiculous.

Spare me.

The waste is astounding.

All of it is built on an economic model that rewards the placement of television advertising that reaches fewer people with each passing day. Enormous commissions drive decision-making on expenditures that are better spent in myriad ways other than network-affiliated advertising, which most people watch without ever seeing a commercial.

Aside from live audience television, which is sports- and local news-focused, and has a mostly old audience, there’s no audience for the ads that billions are spent on, while most of the United States is beggared by the Washington decision-makers.

The greatest outrage over the disenfranchisement of so many by so few at the helm of the party is that the Democratic Party no more belongs to them than the White House belongs to the disgusting Trump family.

It belongs to the people.

It should be guided by the indomitability of Barbara Jordan who said:

My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

Of John Kennedy who said:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Of Franklin Roosevelt who said:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Of Barack Obama who said:

There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

Across those four states the combined Democratic vote in 2024 was roughly 2.5 million people.

In the southern states of Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi, there are more than 4.02 million black Americans. They don’t deserve to be abandoned behind a descending cotton curtain of racial discrimination and malice by a national party of which they are the very beating heart and soul just under six years after the death of John Lewis, four months after the death of Reverend Jesse Jackson, and 25 days after the opening of the Obama Presidential Center.

The Democratic Party must take an American stand on the issues that matter most in the places that matter the most.

The Democratic Party must rise in the South and Mountain West, or make room for a coalition partner that can win elections in a moment when winning requires not just victory, but the victory of men and women of character to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States, who mean what they say and say what they mean.

It’s inexcusable and the cost of it all will be measured in millions of lives in some of the poorest and most desperate places on earth after four years of institutionalized Trump cruelties that were laid over 80 years of compassion and faith in the most elemental concepts of human dignity. They’re all gone now.

Elections have consequences, and because the fascists won, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and within the past week Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, are dead.

Scores have been beaten and scores of thousands abused in one form or another by the lawless American government that dared to send federal agents bearing subpoenas to the doors of New York Times reporters for scratching the surface on Trump’s insanity over the most corrupt object and transaction in the entire history of the United States — the Qatari gift of a personal flying palace to Donald Trump, which is unfit to fly the president of the United States.

The Democratic Party is either a national party or it’s not.

There are cracks in the glass in Mississippi, and at the end of the day, the strategy must be guided by a moral proposition worth fighting for.

There is an old Irish idiom: is this a private fight or can anyone join?

It’s time to join the fight and support these candidacies, but more importantly, demand the Democratic Party be a national party again.

There’s no one who seems more isolated than the hapless Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s most sheltered man.

He trudges from his rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment to Penn station to Union station via Amtrak en route to his Senate office, hideaway, Senate gym, dining room and a few fundraisers, and then back home again.

It’s unfair to say he’s estranged from a country he doesn’t know, doesn’t care about and doesn’t represent because, in the end, he never knew it or cared to get to know it.

If he did he would appreciate the moral necessity of opening a voting rights headquarters near Medgar Ever’s house and another in Neshoba County, and in every corner of Mississippi.

He would appreciate the obligation and delight in meeting it when he went to Mississippi, and said looking up to Fannie Lou Hamer, “We may be late, but the great Democratic Party is here, and we ain’t leaving until we raise the victory banner.”

But he won’t because him and his leadership team don’t have the wherewithal to organize a daily response to the Trump chaos, while being surrounded by hundreds of journalists.

They’re incompetent, feckless and weak.

The United States is in the middle hours of a decade-long crisis that is building towards a terrible conclusion.

Look around.

How could anyone believe otherwise?

We aren’t prisoners.

We’re citizens.

These exceptional candidates deserve not just support, but encouragement and thanks.

I admire them, and will do what I can to help them as best one person can.

Together, we can do a great deal to breathe air into the sails of good causes and good men and women who are ready to help this nation recover and get moving again.

America deserves a Democratic party that is young and faithful, full of energy and ideas, thoroughly American, built from the ground up, standing for ordinary folks across a vast republic whose lives, dignity and voices matter.

When Democrats reach out and give those good Americans a voice and the respect they deserve amazing things will happen.

This is what these four candidates understand.

Sometimes when people look at candidates they do so though a cynical prism. What do they want? What’s in it for them?

With regard to these four patriots they simply want to serve.

We should join the cause.

John McCain used to say there was absolutely nothing better than a good fight.

This is a good fight that you can — and should — join.

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For those who missed it:

On today’s episode of Dead Air, we cut through the spin surrounding three stories that speak to the decay of American political life: the political vacuum left by Lindsey Graham’s death, the unanswered questions surrounding Mitch McConnell’s condition, and what may be one of the most alarming assaults on press freedom in modern American history.

We examine the carefully managed public messaging surrounding Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization, arguing that the American people deserve transparency from a man who has served at the highest levels of government for decades. The conversation explores what has — and hasn’t — been disclosed, and why the absence of clear information fuels growing public skepticism.

We talked about Lindsey Graham’s legacy. I argue that Graham wasn’t merely another Republican senator, but one of the central architects of Donald Trump’s consolidation of power inside the Republican Party. His combination of institutional influence, political cynicism, and personal loyalty to Trump was singular — and leaves behind a void that is unlikely to be filled.

The episode concludes with a discussion of reports that the Department of Justice, acting at the direction of the White House, has subpoenaed four New York Times reporters —Tyler Pager, Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes — following their reporting on Donald Trump’s use of a Qatari aircraft lacking defensive countermeasures. I argue that using the machinery of the federal government against journalists for doing their jobs is an attack on the First Amendment itself and another step toward the criminalization of independent journalism.

Throughout the conversation, we place each story within a larger pattern: the erosion of constitutional norms, the corruption of democratic institutions, and the growing willingness of political power to substitute intimidation for accountability. It’s a sobering conversation about a country drifting further from the constitutional principles that once defined it.

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Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander-in-chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.

— Lindsey Graham, March 8, 2026

Trump’s crude narcissism has blinded many to lesser forms that are endemic within the corrupt media and political establishment, which have revealed their moral rot with a flurry of sanctimonious statements fluffing the greatest “fluffer” of the last 30 years at the hour of his demise .

The statements serve less as eulogies and more like the contrasting dye that courses through human veins in a CAT scan. In this case, however, the utility is illuminating the weak and insincere clique for whom the American crisis is kabuki theater.

It’s the cynicism that binds them all together, and it’s unrelenting.

Perhaps deep down it’s why they so deeply admired Graham, whose cynicism was as pure as glacial ice freshly melted.

His cynicism came in the purest form.

What’s an insurrection between friends, after all?

A great many people have taken to social media with shaded remembrances of Lindsey Graham in which what he became has been omitted from the remembrance.

The Lindsey Graham story is complete. The ending is known.

In the end, it’s reported that Graham said:

I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.

Man plans and God laughs, as they say.

Once again, the folly and hubris of the indispensable man or woman staring back at their reflection has been laid bear. Lindsey Graham’s work is finished, and the undiscovered country of new possibilities closed permanently.

This Robert Frost poem is often misunderstood, but it applies to Lindsey Graham more than most:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Lindsey Graham lived his life in the arena, which was his heroin and our tragedy.

What he was must be reckoned with because it requires relentless confrontation, not ceaseless appeasement.

Power corrupted Lindsey Graham more completely than most because it twisted him into a malignancy which was sinister, aggressive, and ultimately, faithless to his oath. What must be reckoned with at the hour of his death is the meaning of his public life and his embrace of putridity, fascism and cruelty for a seat on Mar-a-Lago’s Predator Patio.

Graham’s life must be measured against the damage he did by the standard Graham set:

One commentator offered this banality on X:

We need more grace in public life, so I will choose to remember the patriot Lindsey Graham I worked with first in ‘95, when he was a young reformist Congressman helping Lamar Alexander and 5 years later as a key wingman for John McCain in 2000. Worthy fights, with much laughter.

Grace?

The arrogance and small narcissism is typical of the Washington, DC, media clique of poseurs, losers and pretenders that has done so much to bring the Trump years to life.

Think about the arrogance required to assert with certitude that the moral high ground around what can and can’t be said about Lindsey Graham should be policed by commentators who demand the erasure of the chaos Graham caused and the disappearance of the people he did it too, while inserting their happy personal memory of a Lindsey Graham joke into the center of the story.

You see, for many, the life of Lindsey Graham can never be about the mayhem, chaos, suffering or death he helped unleash over and over again, frivolously and carelessly.

No, it can’t be about that or the political system he helped break with nuclear weapons-grade demagoguery.

Instead, none of that matters if you happened to have a White Russian somewhere with Lindsey. It now leads to the obnoxious and screeching declaration of “I choose to remember,” which appears to me to be close kin to the philosophy of “I choose not to see.”

This position is first cousin to that of those who cheered on the ICE Gestapo’s lawlessness until someone they loved was locked up, and then it became a national crisis for them.

The indifference is astounding.

What about the Epstein survivors whose dignity Lindsey Graham assailed with his support of Todd Blanche, the most corrupt lawyer in American history to be nominated for attorney general?

What grace do they deserve?

What about the dead American soldiers from Lindsey’s warmongering?

What about the republic?

Pretending isn’t grace.

It’s delusion.

Erasing the millions of human lives that won’t survive the Trump regime because of the evisceration of USAID programs that will weaken America and destabilize a continent from Lindsey Graham’s story, in favor of tales from the Senate floor, the CODEL circuit or campaign trial, is disgraceful.

Lindsey Graham was never a MAGA believer. He was MAGA through cynicism and a bottomless neediness.

He was a fascist for the opportunities it bought him.

Mark Carney, a true statesmen, said the following about Graham:

It isn’t true, and my response to a prime minister I greatly admire is, what about democracy in United States?

What about in Denmark?

What about in Canada?

Lindsey Graham was a constitutional vandal, and a man who was frivolous about human life. Case in point, when he said this on “Face the Nation” on June 21, 2026:

If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.

The praise of hollow politicians and their analogues in the media doesn’t exculpate Lindsey Graham.

It indicts them.

Lindsey Graham was a deeply indifferent man to everything except the man in the mirror.

The brutalized immigrant children and dead Americans were just extras on Fox News to Graham. Part of the show.

He helped collapse trust in democracy with his embrace of extremism and a thousand lies. His moral relativism unleashed a foul tide of depravity that has humiliated America, and made us as weak as we are decadent.

Graham was reckless, irresponsible and wrong about the great questions of his time.

He didn’t serve with honor.

He didn’t serve with grace.

Many commentators seem to think their dispensations mean something when it comes to Graham’s legacy.

They seem to be saying, “But you don’t understand…I knew him and I’m a good person, so he couldn’t have been that bad, right? Maybe?”

In the end, even for the most benign narcissist, it is about them, and that’s why the reaction to Graham’s death is so telling for so many among the so few who shared his gilded cage in the US Senate, or a worn-out spot on the green room couch.

The reaction is a confession of sorts.

What mattered were the small things apparently — a joke, a laugh, a White Russian on a patio.

The big things?

Not so much.

Now isn’t the time to talk about it. It never is. It’s just like the school shootings. It’s never the time.

In fact, it’s exactly the time.

If you’re one of the many coward Republicans who decry the madness in private, condemning it with your thoughts, then thinking about the death of Lindsey Graham should help clarify a couple of things for you.

Lindsey Graham died for MAGA.

He betrayed this country.

His reputation is destroyed.

He is among the great villains in American history.

Think about yours.

It’s too late for Lindsey, but not you.

Here’s the thing: everyone sees through the lies. We know who all these people are, and our anger is righteous and real.

Lindsey’s choice was his alone.

I refuse to look away.

The stakes are too high to pretend a funny man didn’t choose to become a rotten man by following an evil and un-American fascist off a moral cliff, while lighting the Constitution on fire.

I dissent.

Lindsey Graham was a disgrace.

The idea that he stood for freedom in the world is as big a lie as the one about the stolen election.

Lindsey Graham stood for Lindsey Graham, and he did that by lying in bed with Trump.

He was the master of his fate.

He chose poorly. Very poorly.

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I’m also sharing some of what I covered this past week here in case you missed anything. Please make sure to spend some time learning about Dr. , who is the Democratic nominee to replace the now deceased Lindsey Graham. I spoke with her last week.

The written word…

The spoken word…

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And here are the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth installments.

One month and six days after leading the Allied invasion ashore at Utah Beach, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. shared lunch in Normandy with his son, Captain Quentin Roosevelt II.

The father had landed with the first wave at Utah Beach.

The son had landed with the first wave at Omaha Beach.

Later that afternoon, Roosevelt returned to his command tent, wrote a long letter to his wife, and suffered the fatal heart attack that ended one of the most remarkable lives in American history.

He was 56 years old.

It was 82 years ago today.

His life deserves remembrance because Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was one of the greatest Americans our country has ever produced.

As a young man, he worried that he would never have a name of his own.

It was an understandable anxiety.

His father was Theodore Roosevelt — the Rough Rider, the trust-buster, the conservationist, the president whose face would one day be carved into Mount Rushmore.

How do you distinguish yourself when your father has already become immortal?

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. never tried to eclipse him. He simply lived a life worthy of the name.

He fought with extraordinary courage in the First World War, earning some of America’s highest valor decorations among them the Distinguished Service cross, and two Silver Stars. He helped found the American Legion because he believed that service to the republic didn’t end when the shooting stopped.

He served as assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of Puerto Rico, governor-general of the Philippines, and later became chair of the board of American Express. He narrowly lost the 1924 race for governor of New York, a campaign that deepened the political divide between the Republican and Democratic branches of one of America’s most extraordinary families.

It was already a remarkable life.

Then came another war.

Serving as assistant division commander under Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, Brigadier General Roosevelt helped forge the legendary 1st Infantry Division into one of the finest fighting formations of the American Army.

The Big Red One developed two reputations.

The first was for extraordinary combat effectiveness.

The second was for raising hell whenever it came out of combat.

Allen and Roosevelt were largely indifferent to the second reputation.

Their standard was simple: judge soldiers by how they fight.

Men who had survived another campaign had earned the right to celebrate surviving it.

That philosophy offended many career officers, particularly those shaped by the culture of West Point. Omar Bradley believed discipline in garrison and discipline in battle were inseparable.

Allen and Roosevelt believed the battlefield was the only place that ultimately mattered.

Bradley relieved them both after Sicily.

History rendered its own verdict.

Less than a year later, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was chosen to help lead the greatest amphibious invasion in history.

Major General Raymond O. Barton commanded the 4th Infantry Division. Roosevelt was his assistant division commander.

When Roosevelt insisted on landing with the first assault wave at Utah Beach, Barton tried to stop him.

He knew the odds.

Roosevelt was 56 years old. Arthritis forced him to walk with a cane. His heart had already been weakened by years of strain.

To Barton, it looked like a suicide mission.

To Roosevelt, it looked like duty.

He used every ounce of influence he possessed to ensure he would land with his men.

He believed rank imposed obligation.

If young Americans were expected to step into the surf under enemy fire, then so was he.

Nothing went according to plan.

Currents and confusion carried the invasion force hundreds of yards from its intended landing area.

An officer pointed out the obvious. They had landed in the wrong place.

Roosevelt looked around and replied with one of the greatest sentences in American military history:

We’ll start the war from right here.

It wasn’t bravado. It was command.

Standing in the surf with a cane in one hand and a pistol on his hip, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. reorganized scattered units, identified exits from the beach, directed troops inland, and steadied frightened young soldiers under fire.

Hours later, Barton came ashore expecting to discover that his assistant had been killed.

Instead, Roosevelt was waiting for him. Alive. Calm. Already directing the battle.

For his actions that morning, he received the Medal of Honor. He didn’t live to wear it.

On the night of his death, orders promoting him to major general and giving him command of his own division were already on their way.

He never knew.

There’s a temptation in every generation to confuse celebrity with greatness. They aren’t the same thing.

There’s another temptation to confuse wealth with achievement. They aren’t the same thing either.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. spent his youth worrying that he would never possess a name of his own because his father’s shadow was so immense.

History solved the problem.

He earned one.

Today, America once again asks young men and women to wear its uniform while too many around political power seem to regard public office as another business opportunity. The Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, foreign business relationships, licensing arrangements and other commercial enterprises have generated sustained ethical scrutiny because they raise a question every republic must answer: what is power for?

I have often referred to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as “Uday and Qusay.”

They are harsh nicknames. They’re meant to be because republics decay when public office becomes a family business instead of a public trust.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. answered the question differently.

Power existed to serve. Privilege imposed obligation. Honor had to be earned.

Today, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. rests beneath a white marble cross with the lettering etched in gold signifying the grave of a recipient of the Medal of Honor at the Normandy American Cemetery overlooking the English Channel at Colleville-sur-Mer

Beside him lies his younger brother Quentin, the young aviator shot down over France during the First World War. Decades later, the Roosevelt family reunited the brothers so they could rest together.

Walk among those rows of white crosses and something becomes unmistakably clear. Rank disappears. Politics disappears. Fortunes disappear. Fame disappears.

Only sacrifice remains.

If you want to understand what once made America exceptional, don’t begin in Washington. Begin instead at Colleville-sur-Mer.

There, side by side, lie two brothers named Roosevelt.

One died in the First World War.

The other survived two world wars only to die after leading American soldiers ashore on the longest day.

The young man who feared he would never have a name of his own earned one in the only way that truly matters — by living a life of honor.

On this anniversary of his death it warrants reflection around how far we have come —and how far we have fallen.

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The government came for the reporters.

Federal agents arrived at the homes of The New York Times journalists Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt with subpoenas because they reported on the conduct of the president of the United States.

Read that sentence again.

Federal agents.

At the homes of journalists.

Julian E. Barnes.

Eric Lipton.

Tyler Pager.

Eric Schmitt.

Don’t forget Hannah Natanson of The Washington Post. Federal agents searched her home and seized years of reporting equipment and source material.

Don’t forget . Don’t forget Georgia Fort. They were arrested while reporting in Minnesota, prompting widespread First Amendment objections from press-freedom organizations.

Different cases.

Different legal theories.

Different exercises of federal power.

One unmistakable pattern.

The government is moving ever closer to the practice of journalism itself.

This isn’t a media story.

It isn’t a leak story.

It isn’t another partisan spectacle.

It’s a constitutional story.

Full stop.

The First Amendment was never written to protect journalists.

It was written to protect the American people from government.

The founders understood something every generation must learn again.

Power hides.

Power resents scrutiny.

Power fears exposure.

Power almost never announces that liberty is ending.

It advances one justification at a time.

One subpoena.

One search warrant.

One seizure.

One arrest.

One frightened source.

One intimidated reporter.

One knock at the door.

That’s how free societies become less free.

The story that produced these subpoenas is itself extraordinary.

Air Force One isn’t a luxury, a toy, a flying palace, or another indulgence for the vanity of a president.

It’s a military aircraft. It carries the commander in chief. It carries the constitutional authority of the presidency.

It’s built to preserve the continuity of the United States government under the gravest imaginable circumstances.

It’s among the most powerful symbols of the American Republic, and it belongs to the American people — not to the temporary occupant of the Oval Office.

The American people therefore have an absolute right to know every fact surrounding the acceptance of an extraordinary aircraft from the ruling family of Qatar for presidential use.

Every security concern.

Every engineering concern.

Every constitutional question.

Every condition.

Every promise.

Every conversation.

That isn’t curiosity. It’s citizenship. It’s self-government.

Journalists did what they were supposed to do. They investigated. They reported.

The government answered with subpoenas. The administration says these actions are directed at leaks rather than reporters.

The American people are entitled to judge that explanation for themselves. They should judge it against the larger pattern.

Search warrants.

Reporting materials seized.

Subpoenas.

Expanding leak investigations.

Reportedly increasing reliance on polygraphs inside parts of the national security bureaucracy to identify officials speaking with the press.

Healthy governments answer questions. Confident governments rebut criticism.

Governments consumed with discovering who spoke instead of answering what was said reveal something fundamental about themselves.

That’s why this is a constitutional event.

The First Amendment protects more than publication. It protects the process by which truth reaches the public.

Break that process and self-government begins to fail.

There’s one final point.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is scheduled for later this month.

This isn’t an ordinary year.

There’s nothing ordinary about federal agents appearing at the homes of reporters.

There’s nothing ordinary about search warrants executed against journalists.

There’s nothing ordinary about reporting equipment being seized.

There’s nothing ordinary about the cumulative pressure these actions place on a free press.

The annual ritual should give way to constitutional seriousness.

The White House Correspondents’ Association exists for a purpose greater than hosting a dinner. It exists to defend the independence of the White House press corps.

Situations like this reveal whether institutions understand why they exist.

The Democratic Party faces a test as well.

Its leaders should make a simple pledge. No aircraft accepted under these circumstances should ever become Donald Trump’s personal property.

Not after his presidency.

Not at a presidential library.

Not in a private museum.

Not anywhere.

The presidency is a public trust. Its symbols aren’t private trophies.

Every generation inherits the Constitution. No generation owns it.

Every generation decides whether to defend it — or explain why it failed to do so.

The government came for the reporters.

History will remember what happened next.

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Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it.

I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.

We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.

Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.

Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made.

He chose Trump over his friend.

He chose Trump over his country.

He chose Trump over his duty.

He chose Trump over his oath.

Now he’s dead, and Trump is his rotten legacy — and in that, he won’t be alone.

In the end he made an adjudicated rapist laugh and played a lot of golf with him.

He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.

Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.

He was no patriot.

Lindsey Graham made his choice.

The high court of history will pass a brutal judgement about a man who knew better, but chose worse.

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

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For those of you who missed it, here’s the recap of what we covered:

Nobody has seen Mitch McConnell in weeks. He’s reportedly hospitalized, senators are claiming conversations with him, but Washington is starting to look like a reboot of “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Dean and I sic the bloodhounds on the senator from Kentucky, just like he would do. We also wade into the Dems’ Graham Platner mess in Maine, Trump’s latest chaos, and react to the horrific murder of a Houston father at the hands of ICE.

Hope you’ll take a listen.

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For those who missed it, I joined Jim for a wide-ranging conversation on the assault against democratic institutions, the use of government power, unanswered questions surrounding Mitch McConnell’s prolonged absence, and why today’s White House increasingly resembles a fortress instead of the People’s House.

Don’t miss this week’s episode.

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The American people deserve the truth.

Not spin, nor anonymous assurances.

The American people are owed candor when one of the most powerful elected officials in the country suffers a grave medical emergency. They are owed facts, not carefully curated assurances from political allies whose first instinct is to protect an institution, a party, or a reputation — particularly when those assurances come from people who have no credibility whatsoever.

Scott Jennings doesn’t have credibility, and neither do Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his number two John Barrasso from Wyoming.

For the record, an 84-year-old who had CPR performed on him before being put in an ambulance has a roughly six percent chance of ever walking out of a hospital.

I don’t believe Scott Jennings discussed Senate history with Mitch McConnell for 20 minutes.

I don’t believe McConnell discussed Senate business and the Iran war with any of his colleagues, and neither should you. Each of these people is unable to squarely answer a question about who won an election around which there’s no real or credible doubt.

The video footage of Mitch McConnell being loaded into the ambulance doesn’t seem to indicate much urgency, and typically there is only one reason for that.

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets, and the MAGA senators and Mitch McConnell’s staff are out of buckets.

I’ve lived through moments like this, and there was never any doubt about my representations under similar circumstances.

I wonder why.

When Vice President Dick Cheney underwent cardiac surgery, I understood that the credibility of the White House depended on telling the truth. Before speaking publicly, I met personally with the vice president in the recovery room. I saw him awake. I spoke with him. Only then did I tell the country what I knew to be true.

The difference between me and the men mentioned above — and every single person who works for Trump — is that I have credibility and integrity. They don’t.

The United States Senate isn’t a private corporation. It’s one of the principal governing institutions of the constitutional republic. Americans have a legitimate interest in knowing whether one of its senior members is capable of performing the duties of his office.

Whatever the ending may be the historical verdict on Mitch McConnell’s career is already taking shape. The high court of history is convening. The judgement will be appropriately brutal for service so unpatriotic and selfish.

He’s one of the greatest villains across America’s 250-year history.

Mitch McConnell destroyed the functioning and integrity of the US Senate, which was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Today, it’s a joke.

Mitch McConnell helped destroy the integrity of the US Supreme Court and the trust of the American people in it. He’s been an arsonist towards the rule of law in this country.

Mitch McConnell was precisely the type of man George Washington warned about in his farewell. He’s done incredible damage to the American republic.

He lived his life as a partisan cancer, and here at the end, he’s earned his looming two-word obituary: good riddance.

He leaves behind a Senate that’s become a battlefield where power eclipses principle, and procedural warfare has replaced persuasion.

He didn’t invent polarization.

He perfected its institutional application.

His refusal to allow Merrick Garland’s nomination even to receive a hearing marked a constitutional and political turning point. Four years later, his determination to confirm Amy Coney Barrett weeks before a presidential election established a second rule that directly contradicted the first.

Many Americans concluded that there were no rules at all.

Only power.

The damage extended beyond the Senate chamber.

Public confidence in the Supreme Court suffered enormously as millions came to see the institution not as an independent branch of government, but as another arena for raw political combat.

History will remember that, and so will history remember his relationship with Donald Trump.

No Republican leader understood Trump’s character more clearly.

Few warned more eloquently about it.

Yet when confronted with the defining challenge of his political life, Mitch McConnell repeatedly chose accommodation over confrontation.

He enabled what he knew.

He accepted what he condemned.

He preserved his conference, while weakening the republic.

That cowardice will be his epithet, and when he meets the supreme judge of the universe the grace he will need is something he didn’t practice in this life.

Mitch McConnell leaves behind a Senate that is weaker than the one he inherited, a judiciary viewed by millions with deeper suspicion than before, and a political culture in which power too often became an end unto itself.

He lived his life as a constitutional vandal who lifted a fascist he despised into a position to wreck the institutions McConnell professed to revere, but really didn’t.

He used those institutions to enrich his corrupt family and staff who were infamous for erecting what were called “toll booth” agencies in Washington, DC, which demand payment to them before any interest may see the big boss.

One thing that I think you deserve to know is the rumours and innuendo that flow through the small world of politics and media in DC about the lives of America’s most powerful leaders.

The one irrefutable piece of evidence from the whole sordid McConnell spectacle seems to confirm the rumors that McConnell’s marriage to Elaine Chao, presently galavanting around China, was a sham.

Here was the 84-year-old’s wife after learning he’d been taken by ambulance to hospital after having CPR conducted on him:

What a love story.

The United States has become a republic of lies.

The lying is ceaseless, unrelenting and pathetic, yet it’s the defining ethos of this low and squalid era during which insurrectionists serve in Congress and an adjudicated rapist lives in the White House.

Some people may read this, and say it’s a bit harsh.

I mean every word.

Every American patriot should feel the deepest contempt towards Mitch McConnell, one of the most terrible Americans of this or any age.

Personally, I don’t believe he will ever step foot again on the floor of the US Senate.

His public record is complete, and it’s utterly ignominious.

Mitch McConnell ran for the United States Senate in 1980 against a career politician named Walter “Dee” Huddleston, promising to serve two terms.

Here was the famous ad that elected Mitch McConnell to the US Senate:

The dogs are long gone, but I finally learned their names: karma.

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For those who missed it, we had a wide-ranging conversation on the dysfunction in Congress, the Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms, the politics of grievance, and what Democrats must do to restore accountability and rebuild public trust.

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Honor.

It’s among the oldest words in the English language, and one of the least understood.

Honor can’t be purchased.

It can’t be inherited.

It can’t be manufactured by a public relations firm, a propaganda ministry, or an army of sycophants willing to applaud every lie.

Honor is earned.

It’s revealed.

It’s measured by restraint when restraint is difficult. By courage when courage is costly. By dignity when humiliation would be easier. By sacrifice when selfishness is rewarded.

It’s the invisible force that binds together families, military units, republics, and civilizations.

When honor dies, something far greater than reputation is lost. A nation begins to decay.

Donald Trump has become a stain on American honor. Not because his opponents dislike him. Not because of his politics. Not because he is a Republican.

He has become a stain because he has degraded the dignity of the presidency until the office itself has become hostage to his appetites, his impulses, his vanity, and his endless need to dominate every room he enters.

America has never had a president less capable of governing himself. And no man who can’t govern himself is fit to govern a great republic.

Watch him:

There’s no discipline, composure, curiosity, humility, or capacity for reflection.

Only grievance, impulse, performance and chaos.

The NATO summit should have been a demonstration of American leadership at one of the most dangerous moments since the end of the Cold War.

Russia continues its murderous war against Ukraine. China grows stronger. Iran remains unstable — despite declarations of victory from Washington.

The democratic world required steadiness. Instead, it received spectacle.

The president of the United States referred to the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

Think about that.

The commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military confused Japan with Iran, while addressing one of the most consequential strategic crises on Earth.

It would have been funny if it weren’t so humiliating.

He again rattled the saber toward Greenland.

He insulted allies whose sons and daughters have fought and died beside Americans from Normandy to Kandahar.

He transformed what should have been a gathering of allied democracies into another episode in the endless reality show that has become his presidency.

Around the table sat leaders representing nations that have stood with America through triumph and tragedy. They deserved respect. The American people deserved dignity.

Instead, they watched another performance defined by self-absorption, vulgarity, and confusion.

The tragedy isn’t merely that Donald Trump embarrasses himself.

The tragedy is that he embarrasses us. Every American soldier serving overseas. Every diplomat. Every intelligence officer. Every business leader. Every student wearing an American flag on their backpack while studying abroad. Every citizen who has ever taken pride in the simple privilege of carrying an American passport.

The damage can’t be measured by polling. It can’t be measured by stock prices. It can’t be measured by partisan applause. It’s measured in something infinitely harder to restore: respect.

For 80 years, the United States led the greatest alliance in human history because our allies believed that America’s word meant something. That our commitments endured beyond elections. That our presidents understood the difference between strength and swagger.

Strength requires confidence.

Swagger requires insecurity.

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime confusing the two.

The consequences are now visible to the world.

Meanwhile, his much-celebrated triumph over Iran begins to dissolve beneath the weight of reality.

This is always the way with demagogues. Declarations substitute for strategy. Boasts substitute for achievement. Television substitutes for statecraft.

Reality always arrives. It’s undefeated.

History is filled with loud men who believed they could bend reality to their will. History remembers almost none of them kindly.

The greatest American presidents possessed an attribute that Donald Trump entirely lacks. They understood that the office didn’t exist to magnify themselves. They existed to elevate the office.

Washington surrendered power.

Lincoln bore unbearable sorrow without surrendering his humanity.

Eisenhower understood that alliances were America’s greatest strategic advantage.

George H. W. Bush assembled the coalition that liberated Kuwait because he understood that legitimacy matters.

Ronald Reagan never confused theatricality with seriousness when America’s security was at stake.

Donald Trump confuses them every day.

Honor demands self-control, discipline, and the ability to distinguish between personal vanity and national interest.

Donald Trump possesses none of these qualities.

There will come a day when another president of the United States stands before the leaders of the democratic world.

When that day comes, an apology will be owed — not for America, never for America — but for the disgrace inflicted upon America’s name by the man who confused personal narcissism with patriotism.

The apology should be simple.

We remember who we are. We remember what this republic stands for. We remember that American greatness has never rested upon the volume of one man’s voice, but upon the character of a free people determined to remain worthy of the inheritance they received.

Honor isn’t an abstraction.

It’s the foundation upon which republics either stand…or collapse.

The American people now face a choice far greater than one election.

It’s a choice between a politics of honor and a politics of shame. Between dignity and vulgarity. Between a republic that commands respect and one that demands attention.

History will remember which path we chose.

So will our children…and so will the world.

If there was ever a "Fighting Democrat," it's . The California congresswoman never pulls a punch, which is why you don't want to miss her live conversation with me TODAY at 12 pm ET. Rep. Kamlager-Dove will discuss how she's fighting on behalf of people who've been detained by ICE in her district, the chaos unfolding on Capitol Hill, Trump's nonsense and more. Brought to you by . Hope you’ll join us.

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Drawing on her experience caring for children and families, Dr. Andrews offers a perspective that is rarely heard in Washington. She speaks candidly about the youth mental health crisis, the pressures facing parents, and the importance of rebuilding trust in public service through competence rather than spectacle. The conversation also examines the coalition she believes can win — from independents to disaffected Republicans — and why recent polling suggests this race is far more competitive than many political insiders expected.

If you’re interested in understanding where the fight for the Senate will be won or lost — and in meeting one of the candidates seeking to reshape that battlefield — you won’t want to miss this discussion. It’s a thoughtful, substantive conversation about leadership, accountability, and why South Carolina may be one of the most important political stories in America over the next 16 months.

Hope you’ll have a listen to what Dr. Andrews has to say.

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