Sometimes Winners lose, and Losers win. That was the premise that led me to write this column each week. It might merely sound like a clever turn of phrase, but our entire timeline is based on that premise.

All the chaos. All the catastrophe. All the pain and suffering. The potential collapse of our empire, really, is baked into that very simple construction.

Look at it another way. Replace Winners with Heroes, and Losers with Villains, and you have the basic building block of virtually every movie ever made. The Hero is flawed. Always. It’s their flaw that is in tension with their unique ability to overcome the obstacle in front of them. The broad objective isn’t necessarily to vanquish the Villain. In fact, the Villain is simply a force standing in the way of the Hero’s ultimate objective.

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You have to defeat the dragon to save the princess.

Defeating Trump cannot be our ultimate objective. But to achieve our ultimate objective, we must defeat Trump.

Our ultimate objectives are complex, of course, but they include words like freedom and equity, peace and justice. How these vague, shiny words apply to our daily lives, well, we should be able to decide. Maybe that itself is the ultimate objective — the ability to determine the path of our own lives.

The Losers I write about in this column are sometimes grifters, sometimes they’re frauds. They are fools and cowards and fascists and white Christian nationalists. Whatever they are, whatever their personal objective, they are standing in the way of where we need to go.

This will be the last Winners & Losers. Maybe forever. Maybe for a while. I love writing this column, but, honestly, I want to write less about the Villains blocking our path forward, and more about where that incredible path might lead.

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You have chosen a winning Loser! And it wasn’t even close. I’ll reveal your choice in a second. But first, let’s set the table.

Donald Trump is actively working to disrupt the midterms because he knows MAGA candidates are going to get trounced (generally speaking). Since January 2025, Donald Trump has demolished American soft power abroad by cutting aid…

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Last week, you took to the polls to select your Loser of the Quarter-Millennium in a blistering ranked-choice voting system. Two Losers have emerged, which can only mean one thing: it’s time for a runoff!

The voting was pretty remarkable. I write about a lot of Losers in this column. There are the MAHAs, the frauds, the cheats, the hucksters, the idiots,…

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We are officially a quarter-millennium into this thing, and it couldn’t be going better. Really. Everything’s fine. We’re great.

Right?

Right?!

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The Reflecting Pool. The East Wing. The huge-wonderful-fair-that’s-too-hot-and-nobody-showed-up-for. Our broken healthcare system. Exploding personal debt. Environmental calamity. ICE terror in American cities.

Th…

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

We’ve agreed to shift The Waiting Room to a monthly format in order to give me more time to put together a more cohesive post instead of a simple “here’s some healthcare stuff which happened the past couple…

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This week, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation, and there couldn’t be less enthusiasm.

But there should be. We’re in a rough spot right now. There’s no getting around that. But no matter what happens to the United States, time will continue its march forward, nature will run through its endless incredible cycles, and the universe will continue to speed into oblivion.

Rather than a birthday, this year feels like a wake. Of course, we mourn the loss of things and people we love. That would be an apt way to describe the way most of us feel heading into this American holiday: mourning.

But it’s not exactly right. Like the universe and nature and time itself, we will continue. We might be changed. But we will go on.

I watch my kids growing up, little by little and sometimes all at once, and I understand just how we’ll go on. America is not dying. We’re not mourning the loss of something. If anything, we’re mourning the loss of what might have been.

But that’s also wrong. We don’t know what might have been, and now we have an opportunity — I’d say a responsibility — to build something better.

These past weeks I’ve been focusing less on what we’ve gotten wrong, and more on what America has done right. The Winners these past weeks have been a little more historical than usual. This week is no different.

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I was born at the end of the Bicentennial year. Old photographs from that summer show my sun-soaked older brothers and sisters riding their bikes down the street, covered in stars and stripes. Pure American childhood. Ice cream-covered chins. Missing front teeth. Tussled hair. Waving little flags in the grass on the little front lawn. A modest flag waving over the steps where my pregnant mom sits, tanned and glowing and smiling despite having her hands full with all these little kids running around.

The America of that year and that decade was full of challenges. I’ve heard. By the time the decade ended, I had just turned three. But back in ‘76, my father had only been back from Vietnam for 7 or 8 years. Nixon resigned in disgrace only a few years before. Stagflation was turning the screws on families like mine. High inflation plus slow growth and relatively high unemployment meant rising prices at the grocery store and job anxiety across the board.

The OPEC oil embargo had resulted in gas lines and price spikes, and by the Bicentennial, Americans could probably see that the era of cheap, endless energy was coming to an abrupt end.

The Church Committee investigations had pulled the curtains back on abuses by the CIA and FBI. Combine that with the fall of Saigon in ‘75 and Nixon’s humiliation, and trust in our government and institutions tanked.

Black Americans were still facing housing discrimination, police brutality, and the reality of being shut out of the larger economy, even after civil rights victories only a decade earlier. Material equality had not been a result of legal equality.

What was the point of our government? What was the point of any of it?

Fifty years later, the parallels are striking. Our economic turmoil is driven by needless humiliation abroad and a crisis in the Middle East. The racism that kept black Americans from buying homes and making real gains never went away. People like Pete Hegseth are dismissing and demoting soldiers because they aren’t white men. Oil and gas prices are wreaking havoc on the day-to-day lives of most of us.

Once again we wonder: what is the point of our government?

But there is a difference between the bicentennial and this Semiquincentennial.

In those yellowed pictures my mom still keeps in white and red and blue albums lining her bookshelves, the faces of her and my dad and their neighbors and the kids running through the yard and the candid folks in the background who didn’t even know they were being photographed — everyone’s face held an emotion that was so deep and earnest and obvious that it seems frivolous.

It was hope.

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It’s possible — maybe even likely — that I’m tracing my own nostalgia along the outlines of their happy faces and seeing something that wasn’t there. But I don’t think so. The flags. The red-striped, star-spangled jammies. It was America, and it was wounded, but it would continue to exist, striving to be better.

I wonder about a child born this year, looking back over pictures of her own pregnant mother, fifty years from now. Will she see hope in the faces staring back at her through the decades? Maybe. But more likely she’ll see doubt. She’ll see tension and anxiety.

It’s devastating, this anniversary of our country, because it’s so difficult to find joy, to find hope, to imagine a way into the next 250 years that doesn’t involve some incredibly difficult times.

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In a 1989 CNN interview with Larry King, Donald J. Trump, who would be sworn into the presidency of the United States less than two decades later, said he told a reporter: "Of course I hate these people … maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."

He was referring specifically to the five young black and Latino kids who would become known as the Central Park Five, who were falsely accused and convicted of attacking a woman jogger in Central Park.

Hate is what we need, he said. He spent around $85,000 on full-page ads in the major NYC papers with the headline “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The ad didn’t specifically reference these boys, but it was clearly aimed at them and at anyone who might look like them.

The five boys were exonerated in 2002 via DNA and a confession from the actual attacker.

Donald J. Trump is a Loser.

Donald J. Trump, Loser

He’s the Big Boss King Loser of all time. I don’t usually write about him here because it’s obvious he’s the King Loser.

But last Monday night, he attended NBA Finals game three at Madison Square Garden in his home city, the city where he believes hate is what we need.

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Before I unleash this week’s Loser on you, I have to plug Six Questions with Steven Beshcloss (and a couple other things).

It’s a new podcast we’ve launched (you probably heard about it last week). We premiered last week with the incredible , and we’ve got New York congressional candidate on with this week. It’s a smart, sharp show that comes in a tight little package. The framing — six questions — is meant to pack a punch without packing for an overnight stay.

At a time when content comes at you from a million different places, it’s kind of revelatory to get guests like these to cover so much ground in so little time — the premiere ran about 27 minutes. In and out.

But this show is the tip of the spear of another project I’m very excited about: lots of our content is — or will soon be — available as podcasts. Shows like Behind the Numbers, Strategy Session, First Draft, Unholy Ground, The Two Joes, On The Ground with Joe Trippi and lots more will soon be found on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your pods, so that you can listen on your car ride (or, like me, catch up on your favorite pods while you mow the lawn on Saturdays).

Even if you don’t do podcasts (our loyal Substackers out there, unite!), we’d love for you to click on the link below and follow Six Questions. Another great thing about this show: it’s not seat-of-your-pants breaking news. If you hold onto it for a few days, it’ll still be relevant, unlike so much streaming content these days.

Let us know what you think!

Okay. Where was I? Oh yes, Losers.

Last week, on June 2nd, a sort of Freaky Friday thing happened with two men who are essentially opposites. One, who is patently unqualified to do a specific job, was hired to do that job. The other, who has 51 Emmys for doing his job, was fired from it.

This column could be called “Failing Upward,” or “Lifestyles of the Rich and Fraudulent.” Every week there is another example of men or women being elevated to jobs they simply are not qualified for because they are willing to do bad things for the boss.

This is another one of them. But this is much, much bigger than a fraud being hired to do a big job. It’s a threat to our civilization.

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Bill Pulte, Loser

Bill Pulte is the grandson of William J. Pulte, founder of PulteGroup, one of the largest U.S. homebuilders. He’s worth about $200 million, he claims.

He is the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

As of last Tuesday, he’s ALSO the acting Director of National Intelligence (he will continue to do the other jobs, too, because of course he will).

On Truth Social, Trump said that Pulte has “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America … over $10 trillion at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.”

Trump said he’s “a very talented guy.”

The second before he was elevated to DNI, he had exactly zero minutes of experience in national intelligence, although he is reportedly a Trump donor.

I’m not going to linger on the intrigue surrounding his elevation to this role. Lots has been written about it already. But before we move on, let’s talk about the role itself.

The Director of National Intelligence is the highest-ranking intelligence official in the United States government and the President’s principal intelligence officer. They oversee and coordinate the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community, including the CIA and the NSA.

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Last week was particularly dumb. By the end of the day on Friday, though, more and more news was breaking that Trump was losing in the courts. The slush fund was stopped (for now); his name has to be taken off the Kennedy Center and it has to be reopened (for now).

When stories like these break, my first reaction is joy. Or maybe hope. Sometimes we win! There is still good in the world!

Yay.

But then I remember how stupid all of this is. I’d rather see the output of all this energy result in single-payer healthcare, or an actionable and inspiring roadmap for solving the climate crisis. Instead, our victories involve putty knives scraping a gold-plated name off a closed-down building. Yippee.

My Loser this week embodies all of that stupidity … and more! And my Winner embodies the opposite.

Let’s go.

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Markwayne Mullin, Loser

Last week, Markwayne, which is a name that makes me stupider every time I say it, told Hannity (another such name) that "radical-left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our jobs," so "we shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities either."

In other words, the Homeland Security Secretary is threatening to functionally shut down international travel — both in and out of the country — in airports that service blue cities (or, more specifically, “sanctuary” cities).

Fortunately, there aren’t many major international airports in blue cit …. wait a second. Crap. They’re all in blue cities.

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

Today I’m launching a new cost analysis project which looks at the total increase in healthcare spending that the ~19 million or so ACA marketplace enrollees who managed to cling to their coverage are facing…

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You can’t kick a football in Washington without hitting a great candidate for Loser of the Week. Winners are somewhat harder to come by, but they exist!

This week’s Loser is one I’ve really been wanting to write about for a while, but he’s one of those Losers who’s always kind of lurking in the background, talking nonsense but never really doing much or accomplishing anything.

Now we know why: he sucks.

Let’s dig in.

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Seb Gorka, Loser

Earlier this month, the White House released its Counterterrorism Strategy. It was produced by the White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, who is a Loser.

Is that mean-spirited? Well. Maybe. But it’s also possible that he is objectively a Loser. I shall do my best to prove it.

Let’s start with the Counterterrorism Strategy. This document is the product of a 40-year tradition, rooted in Reagan, formalized after 9/11, carried by every president of both parties — including Trump in 2018. It historically produced sober documents that named real threats and assessed real capabilities, and matched those threats and those capabilities to offer a realistic, clear-eyed strategy for mitigating the danger to Americans.

It was, in other words, a strategy. Strategies are built around concrete steps one might take to solve a particular problem, right?

The Gorka strategy does not do that. It names a problem, yes, although it’s not the problem you think it is (more on that in a minute), but it offers no concrete solutions to the problem it names or to any problem, really. This is a culture war document, and not a very good one.

In fact, the very first thing you see here is a signed forward by Trump. He wants you to know, dear reader, that he has ended “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.”

As usual, he skips a bunch of rhetorical steps. He doesn’t define weakness, failure, surrender, or humiliation, which means we sort of have to take his word for it. Were we humiliated? Who knows? His base will take his word for it and agree without evidence.

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

The last edition included the second half of my deep, wonky dive into the final, official 2026 ACA Open Enrollment Period data, along with some initial effectuated data updates for California, Colorado, Geor…

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Last week, a Dutch-flagged Antarctic expedition cruise ship carrying 146 passengers from 23 countries (including 17 Americans), parked itself off Cape Verde because Spain’s Canary Islands president refused to let it dock in Tenerife.

You’ve probably heard of this story. Also aboard this ship: a potential outbreak of the Andes virus, the only known strain of the hantavirus that spreads human to human.

The story starts back in mid-April. On April 11, a 70-year-old Dutchman succumbed to intense symptoms of headache, fever, and diarrhea that rapidly progressed to respiratory distress. There was no testing done to figure out what the hell killed him, but the captain of the ship told everyone aboard that the ship was not infectious.

It took nearly two weeks for the body to be removed from the ship in Saint Helena. Thirty other passengers disembarked at that time and spread like the wind.

A close contact of the man who died flew from Saint Helena to Johannesburg. She had been feeling ill, and her condition deteriorated on the flight home. She was rushed to the ER upon arrival in Joburg where she was pronounced dead.

This story is pretty triggering, coming in so hot after the global trauma of COVID. It’s worth noting that while the disease is super deadly, it’s also vanishingly rare, and the CDC has classified this as a Level 3 emergency, its lowest tier.

So why am I beginning this week’s Winners & Losers with this story?

RFK Jr. Loser

Because RFK Jr. is a fucking Loser. But hark! I’m not going to talk about how he sacked the team of inspectors dealing with cruise-ship sanitation.

And I’m not going to try to scare you about the potential for another global pandemic (this one worse than the last). This week I’m talking about anti-depressants and science, two things our Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn’t believe in.

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Great stories have great characters. And great characters are built out of flesh and blood. A good hero isn’t flawless. They aren’t always good. They make mistakes, and sometimes their flaws verge on fatal. The greater the flaw, the greater the exuberance we all feel when they overcome it to succeed in the end.

A great villain wants something beyond the literal object of their villainy. Yes, they are going to destroy the city. But they also want to show their mom how great they are!

In fact, one of the great strengths of Trump is his seemingly endless well of badness. If he were a movie villain, he’d need some workshopping. It’s human nature for us to wait around for redemption, for the qualities that will make him a whole-cloth member of the human race to spring forth. We tend to give people — even villains — the benefit of the doubt. Or, at least, we wonder what trauma in their lives led to their villainy.

But Trump is irredeemable, fully. He steals money from everyone. Literally everyone. He would sell his own children if it benefited him. He sells the men and women who devote their love to him shitty swag — watches and coins and NFTs and pennants and wallets and piles upon piles of overpriced giftshop slop. They believe buying his garbage makes him love them. And he lets them believe that. He’s destroying the country because, well, that’s all he’s got.

And, of course, there are those allegations that he abused children.

His actions are unforgivable. His villainhood is so cartoonish as to be shockingly one-dimensional, and that’s why it works. I still want him to reveal something that feels authentically good. Or, maybe even just authentically okay. Or at least find some deep well of trauma that led him to this awful conclusion to explain why he’s doing this to us. But nothing like that is coming.

Watching the world shatter around us is like sinking into an endless Netflix binge of the dumbest, most engrossing, high-stakes, good-vs.-evil series of all time. Partly because for so much of it, most of us have the awful feeling of being bystanders. While the actions of the administration and its proxies have enormous impacts on our day-to-day lives, sometimes it feels like all we can do is sit back and watch it happen, like we’re watching it on TV.

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Greetings, Lincoln Square readers!

I had to skip last week as I was out of town picking up my kid from college for the summer, so there’s actually three weeks of healthcare policy insanity to catch up with …

The last edition included the first…

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Remember when Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis?” That was awesome.

At the time, I felt kind of uncomfortable at the positive feelings I had for that statement. All social media is built to keep you angry and agitated. If you accidentally land on the X “For You” feed (God help you), you’ll find yourself face-to-face with street fights, videos of muggings, men punching women, shootings, plane crashes, dash-cam footage of car crashes, wild animals mauling tourists.

I could go on. That list is actually the tamest of the bunch (please, please, please take my word for it).

In this political moment, it’s incredibly important — at least in my opinion — to be rational. You have to save your outrage for the truly outrageous, or else it loses all meaning. When the entire internet is conspiring toward making you as mad as possible, this is a real task.

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You only have to look at the anger of the right to know what I’m talking about. They’re pissed as hell that women are playing men’s sports (or is it the other way around?) They were outraged over a bullshit conspiracy theory that teachers were providing litter boxes for children who identified as cats. And have you heard of this guy, Hunter Biden? Don’t even get them started. Also, Benghazi and emails and Obama, and, and, and …!

Anger, anxiety, hatred — these are like viruses looking for a host. I always imagine that bad feelings like anxiety begin not with an object, but with the emotion itself, and then attach to an object to sustain themselves. Nothing made Republicans mad. They are just…mad. Do you believe that if MAGA was shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that children weren’t using litter boxes in schools that their anger would disappear? No. They are angry and they will find a reason for it … somewhere. Anywhere.

On the other hand, anger is a real emotion, and it’s valid. You are allowed to be angry. It’s even better when your anger is well-placed.

The Jacob Frey thing, for me at least, represented the moment when my sadness at the second Trump term turned to righteous anger. I remembered that anger is real, and nobody has to give me permission to feel it. And the anger I felt was good and powerful.

Last week was stupid. It was the dumbest week of the dumbest year of the dumbest decade. You can claim that there were dumber weeks, and I probably won’t disagree. I don’t really care which is the dumbest week. But last week is at least in the running.

It’s gone — to me, at least — from absurd and stupid and you-just-gotta-laugh-because-you’d-cry-otherwise, to fuck these people. I’m so sick of it.

This week’s Loser is a total clown who has failed upward and I’m going to make fun of him, but make no mistake, I feel anger toward this guy. Our Winner is not so much a person as it is an expression of our collective anger in action.

Sadness is lingering and isolating. Anger, my friends, can be productive.

Hung Cao, Loser

Welcome to MAGA Loser Whack-a-Mole. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, a Vietnamese-American who is also a Christian nationalist becomes our acting Secretary of the Navy.

Let me back up.

It turns out we are the middle of conducting one of the most substantial Naval blockades in decades and a hot war in the Middle East, in which our Navy is acting as the tip of the spear. So, of course, last week the Secretary of the Navy was fired.

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It’s time again for your weekly checklist of Losers and Winners, and a reminder that all of the chaos, tumult, awfulness, and catastrophe you are experiencing is caused by people.

Tariffs, my friends, do not exist in nature. They are constructed. Bombing a civilization into the Stone Age is a choice made by a (not very smart or moral) human. A fair society is built on a foundation of accountability. Minh Ly, the author of Answering to Us: Why Democracy Demands Accountability, gave me an incredible analogy a few months ago. It’s possible you’ve read about it in this column before, but here we go again:

Imagine you live in a small village. You hire a sheriff and give him the only gun in the region. Without any mechanism for accountability, this sheriff may or may not become a king-like figure, able to kill or coerce anyone on his own whims. The gun — or any power we bestow upon our leaders — needs to be in service to a civic purpose, not in service to calcifying control in the hands of the person who wields it.

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It sounds pretty obvious. The sheriff in this analogy must understand that if he uses the gun for his own purposes, he will face consequences. The more power we bestow on our leaders, the more severe the consequences ought to be for its misuse.

Obvious, maybe, but not inherent. We have failed to hold Trump accountable for anything. We have failed to even make him fear accountability. His shit polling is great as a headline, but a terrible poll is just, well, a piece of paper that predicts the future. Trump doesn’t fear paper, and he doesn’t fear the future.

The election of Biden in 2020 was at least a measure of accountability. It was a relief, sure, but look what happened. Trump did not accept that measure of accountability (he still doesn’t believe he lost!), and nobody on our side or any side went the extra step to enact durable, real accountability commensurate with his crimes.

And here we are. Kinda fucked.

But not totally fucked! This week’s Winners & Losers is about the possibility of real accountability, and the incredibly difficult work ahead of us.

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JD Vance, Loser

What a repugnant piece of shit. I hate to write that because it’s more, like, ad hominem than I like to go. Maybe more puerile. But I’m just so sick of this guy.

Turns out, most Americans are, too. In a recent YouGov poll, the most positive takeaway for Vance is that 96% of respondents had heard of him. That’s where the positives stop, because to know him is to hate him.

Since January, most polls have his favorability plunging into the mid- to low-30s. To be fair, what’s not not to love? This guy sucks.

But the last two weeks have been especially bad for our Vice President. Let’s review.

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I go into every week with the hope that I will be able to highlight good things that are happening for working class Americans. I want to write about how women have gained rights for them and their daughters, not how they have to be more fearful. And I want to provide an outlook for the future that we can be proud of …

But that simply isn’t the reality we live in. So I sit here on a Friday morning writing about men resigning from Congress in shame. I write about 62 million visits to an online rape academy. And I try to bend a monopolistic merger into some sort of consumer value for people who can’t afford to travel.

One day we might get there, the midterms are coming up quick, but right now – we endure the chaos and try to make sense of another week under the Trump regime. It can be difficult, but if there is one thing I have learned over the past year of this second Trump term, it’s that the sheer will of the American people is unmatched.

They will not defeat us and we will keep on fighting.

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Monday, 4/13 – Swalwell & Gonzales Get the Message

Under threat of expulsion, Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales resigned from Congress this week.

They both escaped the almost certain national and political embarrassment of investigations and expulsion votes for their respective scandals, but are still waiting to see what other consequences may arise.

In Swalwell’s case, the pressure had been building for weeks. Reports of inappropriate relationships with staffers – paired with questions about judgement, power dynamics, and internal office expenditures – triggered a House Ethics Committee review that was not going away quietly. What started as whispers online turned into documented complaints, and once leadership realized the votes were there to move forward, the writing was on the wall for Swalwell. Resigning now lets him avoid the spectacle of a formal congressional rebuke, but it doesn’t erase the paper trail or whatever comes out of the investigations announced by the Manhattan DA and authorities in Los Angeles.

Gonzales’ situation played out differently, but ended in the same place. Allegations tied to misuse of campaign funds along with a personal relationship with a staffer that reportedly ended with her setting herself on fire opened the door for both ethics scrutiny and potential legal exposure. Once details started to harden and his Republican colleagues began to distance themselves, his refusal to resign became a liability. Staying meant risking not just his seat, but a very public unraveling of everything tied to his name.

That’s what matters here. This wasn’t personal accountability – not really. It was timing. It was two members that read the room and understood that the system was finally about to move. They just chose the exit before they were forced out of it.

Because in Congress, resignation isn’t the punishment – it’s just the escape hatch.

Source: CNN

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One of the reasons Americans are so fed up right now is that the average person has been priced out of entertainment. The tradeoff is always what people are willing to put up with from the government and how affordable their lives are, and that bargain has been broken. These days, I wonder if the Costco hot dog and soda combo is the last good deal we have.

An afternoon at the ballpark used to feel like that sort of bargain. You could attend a game, sit in the bleachers, and eat hot dogs and popcorn for a reasonable price. It was an easy way to enjoy being around other people, some entertainment in the game, and a day outside. For my birthday recently, I went to a Colorado Rockies game. It was the home opener, I expected the tickets would be a little more, but $86 (per ticket) to sit in left field for one of the worst teams in the league felt unreasonable.

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The entire experience was the bare minimum. From the food, to the crowd control, to vendor placement and employee interactions. It just felt off and lackadaisical. That just seems to be par for the course in America these days: the working class pays a premium to escape the chaos, and still gets the bare minimum in return.

We’re paying more than ever for things that are supposed to give us a break from all of this, and it still feels hollow. We aren’t really asking for luxury, just a fair shake at quality of life.

Yet, here we are.

While Trump fights with the Pope, we try to enjoy Rory McIlroy’s win at The Masters. The scandalous news with a Super Bowl coach and a sideline reporter grabs our attention, and the Democratic base holding one of their own accountable might feel like a moment of civic pride–even as we sit on the brink of resuming war with Iran.

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