Column

SACRAMENTO — There are “Wizard of Oz” echoes in the retaliatory redistricting fight being waged by California Democrats against President Trump and Texas Republicans.

That’s mainly because of the script being followed by Republican opponents. But Democrats seem to be parroting some Oz lines, too.

That was evident last week during several tense debates by California lawmakers on legislation setting a special state election for Nov. 4 to counteract Texas’ attempts to flip five congressional seats from Democrats to Republicans.

The California measures would temporarily suspend the state Constitution to allow legislators — rather than an independent citizens commission — to redraw U.S. House districts. The Democrats’ aim is to flip five Republican seats in California and neutralize the Texas GOP’s action. Democrats already have drawn the new lines, but voters must approve them.

At stake is control of the U.S. House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

California’s Legislature, after much emotional rhetoric, easily passed the Democrats’ proposed constitutional amendment and supporting legislation on party-line, supermajority votes. The bills were immediately signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, their instigator and chief promoter. They’ll be Proposition 50 on the November ballot.

All the while, script lines from “The Wizard of Oz” movie classic kept ringing in my ears.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” the Wizard implores Dorothy and her pals after her little dog, Toto, pulls back the curtain to reveal him as a fraud.

In Sacramento, it’s as if Republicans — and progressive do-gooders — are being admonished to pay no attention to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has committed the same sins of partisan redistricting that they’re attacking Newsom for. The Texan isn’t even mentioned by California assailants of Newsom’s gerrymandering. It smacks of hypocrisy.

What Abbott’s doing is even worse by good government standards. Unlike Newsom, he isn’t seeking voter approval.

Abbott doesn’t have to, of course. In Texas, it’s perfectly legal for the legislature to rig congressional districts for partisan advantage. In California, voters banned gerrymandering of congressional districts in 2010 and turned over their drawing to the bipartisan citizens commission. Newsom needs voter permission to suspend that law.

Nationally, Democrats need to gain only a handful of seats to capture control of the House and end the GOP’s one-party rule of Washington. Trump fears that likelihood. So he pressured Abbott into engineering a legislative gerrymandering of Texas’ House districts in mid-decade, rather than wait for the normal redrawing after the 2030 census. And he’s browbeating other red state governors to likewise rig their congressional lines.

“California will not be a bystander to Trump’s power grab,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Salinas) said as Newsom signed the legislation. “We will not stand by while the House is hijacked by authoritarianism.”

But back to the Emerald City.

The Wizard introduces himself to Dorothy by bellowing behind the curtain: “I am Oz, the great and powerful.” Later, he breaks his word to the girl, she sees through his bullying and stands up to him, scolding: “If you were really great and powerful, you’d keep your promises.”

Trump is a great big bully whose word can’t be taken at face value because he consistently changes his mind to fit the moment. He’s clearly anti-California, holding back federal funds, assessing fines and reducing environmental protections. Newsom and Democratic leaders will repeatedly remind voters of that as the election approaches.

Unlike Dorothy, it’s a rare Republican elected official who has the courage to stand up to this power-obsessed bully. But one surprisingly surfaced during the Assembly redistricting debate.

Referring to Trump’s urging Abbott and other GOP governors to gerrymander districts, Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher of Yuba City asserted: “He is wrong to do so.” And he added for emphasis: “Let me repeat. He is wrong…. Where does it end?”

Later, Gallagher reiterated, “My president is wrong on this point. What I don’t hear from the other side is, ‘My governor is wrong.’ ”

Gallagher and several Republicans insist — as Newsom and Democrats do — that gerrymandering should be outlawed in every state and district lines drawn by citizens’ commissions rather than self-interested legislators. But that won’t happen in the foreseeable future.

Gallagher also contended that Democrats are hyping Trump’s threat to democracy. He said they’re arguing that “in order to save democracy, we must undermine it” by committing sleazy gerrymandering.

He has a point about the Democrats’ excessive warning of democracy’s peril under Trump.

“Californians won’t stand by while Donald Trump destroys democracy,” Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) declared during an oft-uncivil hearing of the Assembly Elections Committee. “If we let Trump get away with this rigging of elections, then we may not have free and fair elections in the future.”

That seems a stretch.

This and other hyperbole by several legislators of both parties reminded me of frightened Dorothy, Tin Man and Scarecrow chanting in the dark forest: “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

I suspect the best pitch for Proposition 50 in this heavily Democratic state is a straight-forward anti-Trump message focused on his inhuman policies and the urgent need to restore checks and balances in Washington.

“We are going to punch this bully in the mouth,” Newsom vowed during a press conference hosted by the Democratic National Committee.

OK, but the governor should cool the Trump-like rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t impress Dorothy or — more important — her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Most California voters disapprove of Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, poll shows
The TK: The Supreme Court could give immigration agents broad power to stop and question Latinos
The L.A. Times Special: This red state fears Californians bringing ‘radical, leftist ideology.’ It’s targeting teachers

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Like most Americans, including White House reporters apparently, I’ve tuned out Donald Trump’s incessant Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election — “by a lot.” That means his nonsense about rigged voting and Democrats’ cheating goes mostly unchallenged, and he continues to undermine faith in U.S. elections. After all, it’s not like anyone can shut him up.

Still, it’s time to quit tuning out. Whether a reporter on the beat or a citizen in conversation anywhere, pay attention and push back against Trump’s un-American blather. Because in recent days the power-drunk president has in various ways telegraphed that his Big Lie isn’t just about a past election but a pretext for what he could do to disrupt the next one, the 2026 midterm elections for Congress.

Other 2020 election liars are paying a big price, literally. Just this week, right-wing Newsmax agreed to pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems, on top of $40 million in March to Smartmatic, to settle defamation lawsuits based on Newsmax’s false reporting (echoing Trump) that the companies rigged voting machines for Joe Biden. Newsmax’s penalty is of course dwarfed by the $787 million that Fox News paid to Dominion in 2023; in a pending trial, Smartmatic seeks $2.7 billion from Fox.

All the while, the president of the United States continues to spout the same slop, all but immune to legal action, as he sets the stage for 2026.

On Friday, after Trump’s bro-fest summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine, Trump happily recounted to Fox’s Sean Hannity in Alaska that the two presidents digressed to discuss the 2020 U.S. election and — what do you know? — Putin, the KGB-trained master manipulator and well-known arbiter of honest elections (not) supposedly assured Trump that, yes, he actually won big but the election was rigged against him.

As an aside here, recall that Hannity and other Fox network stars privately trashed Trump’s 2020 election lie, according to filings in the Dominion lawsuit, and that Hannity testified under oath: “I did not believe it for one second.” Yet in Anchorage, Hannity nodded along as Trump told him that Putin said Trump won in 2020 “by so much,“ but “your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.”

Assuming Putin said what Trump claims, the Russian was playing to Trump’s longstanding, groundless gripes not only against the 2020 election but against voting by mail, which Democratic voters use much more than Republicans do. And Trump, ever the Kremlin’s useful idiot, took his cue: First thing on Monday morning, he declared in a long, error-filled and much-capitalized social media diatribe that he’d “lead a movement” to ban mail ballots and voting machines.

Trump repeated Putin’s falsehood that the United States is “the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” But in fact, dozens of countries use mail ballots and, as with other forms of voting, research, along with the courts, has found that fraud is vanishingly rare.

The president’s stance on mail ballots is like his position on a ceasefire in Ukraine: He was for it before he was against it (and he was for both things before getting ensnared in Putin’s web on Friday). In 2024, bending to Republican officials’ pleadings that he drop his opposition to mail ballots, Trump urged supporters to vote by mail — as he typically, and hypocritically, does — and even recorded a video promotion.

Now that Trump is back to opposing mail ballots, in Monday morning’s social media rant he yet again contradicted the plain words of the Constitution to claim powers he doesn’t have, that he can order states to get rid of mail ballots and voting machines. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

Here’s the Constitution on that: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

It’s just more proof that both times Trump took the oath of office to uphold the Constitution and “see that the laws are faithfully executed,” he lied then, too.

The president has since repeated that he, with Republican allies, will “do everything possible” to end mail ballots. And he’s saying the quiet part out loud: Without mail-in voting, he told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, “you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting.”

There you have it. Trump’s “movement” against mail ballots, along with his push for red states to redraw congressional district lines to elect more Republicans, is all part of how he’s trying rig elections in 2026, in what is expected to be a bad year for his party given his unpopularity. And it’s all predicated on the Big Lie about nonexistent Democratic election cheating.

There are other warning signs: Trump’s military takeover of the District of Columbia. (Every day brings another announcement of a Republican governor sending National Guard troops.) His occupation of Los Angeles. Repeated threats to send troops to other big, blue cities. All on specious grounds and over the objections of elected local and state leaders.

It’s wholly imaginable, then, that on trumped-up claims (pun absolutely intended) about potential election fraud, Trump would militarize Democratic vote-heavy cities in time for next year’s elections. At a minimum, that would surely intimidate some would-be voters. At worst, well, I don’t even want to speculate about the worst.

When Trump entered presidential politics a decade ago, it took a while for journalists to get comfortable applying the L-word: Liar. But he earned it. Now he’s all but inviting us to expand the nomenclature to include autocrat, dictator or even the F-bomb, fascist.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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SACRAMENTO — One accusation hurled at Gov. Gavin Newsom for his retaliatory redistricting move against President Trump and Texas Republicans is that he’s overriding the will of California voters. Rubbish.

The flawed argument goes like this:

Californians — once upon a time — voted overwhelmingly to ban partisan gerrymandering and strip the task of drawing congressional seats from self-interested legislators. In a historic political reform, redistricting was turned over to an independent citizens’ commission. Now, Newsom is trying to subvert the voters’ edict.

“It is really a calculated power grab that dismantles the very safeguards voters put in place,” California Republican Party Chairwoman Corrin Rankin said in a statement last week, echoing other party members. “This is Gavin the Gaslighter overturning the will of the voters and telling you it’s for your own good.”

Again, baloney.

Power grab? Sure. Overturning the voters’ will? Hardly.

Newsom is asking voters to express a new will–seeking permission to fight back against Trump’s underhanded attempt to redraw congressional districts in Texas and other red states so Republicans can retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

First of all, that anti-gerrymandering vote creating the citizens’ commission was 15 years ago. It was a wise decision and badly needed, and still a wonderful concept in the abstract. But that was then, this is now.

Just because a ballot measure was passed one or two decades ago doesn’t mean it has been cast in stone. Would Californians still vote to ban same-sex marriage or deny public schooling to undocumented children? Doubtful. Circumstances and views change.

Second, that 2010 electorate no longer exists. Today’s electorate is substantially different. And it shouldn’t necessarily be tied to the past.

Consider:

• Of the 23.6 million adult California citizens in 2010 — the eligible voters — an estimated 3.6 million have died, or more than 15%, according to population experts at the state Finance Department.
• In all, “at least half of the voter registration file is totally new compared to 2010. And that might even be an understatement,” says Eric McGhee, a demographer at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “There’s been a lot of turnover. It’s a different electorate.”
  People have left the state and others have moved in. Millions of kids have become voting adults.
• There are roughly 6 million more Californians registered to vote today than 15 years ago — 23 million compared to 17 million. “That’s a pretty huge change,” says Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., who has drawn the proposed new Democratic-friendly California congressional maps for Newsom.
• And the partisan makeup of registered voters has become more favorable toward Democrats, who enjoy a nearly 2-to-1 advantage. In last year’s presidential election, Democrats accounted for 46% of registered voters and Republicans 25%. In 2010, it still seemed somewhat competitive. Democrats were at 44% and Republicans 31%.

PPIC researchers recently reported that “partisanship now shapes the state’s migration — with those moving out of the state more likely to be Republican and those moving in more likely to be Democrat. … This process makes California more Democratic than it would otherwise be.”

So, Newsom and Democratic legislators are not thumbing their noses at the voters’ will. They’re asking today’s voters to suspend the ban on gerrymandering and adopt a partisan redistricting plan at a Nov. 4 special election. The good government process of map drawing by the citizen’s commission would return after the 2030 decennial census.

The heavily Democratic Legislature will pass a state constitutional amendment containing Newsom’s plan and put it on the ballot, probably this week.

It would take effect only if Texas or other red states bow to Trump’s demand to gerrymander their congressional districts to rig them for Republicans. Trump is seeking five more GOP seats from Texas and Gov. Greg Abbott is trying to oblige. Republicans already hold 25 of the 38 seats.

Newsom’s plan, released Friday, counters Texas’ scheme with a blatant gerrymander of his own. It would gain five Democratic seats. Democrats already outnumber Republicans on the California House delegation 43 to 9.

Neither the governor nor any Democrats are defending gerrymandering. They agree it’s evil politics. They support redistricting by the citizens’ commission and believe this high-road process should be required in every state. But that’s not about to happen. And to stand by meekly without matching the red states’ election rigging would amount to unilateral disarmament, they contend correctly.

“It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be,” Newsom declared at a campaign kickoff last week. “We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt. And we have got to meet fire with fire.”

But polling indicates it could be a tough sell to voters. A large majority believe the bipartisan citizens commission should draw congressional districts, not the politicians who they don’t particularly trust.

“It’ll be complicated to explain to voters why two wrongs make a right,” says Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, a GOP never-Trumper.

Former GOP redistricting consultant Tony Quinn says: “There is no way to ‘educate’ voters on district line drawing. And Californians vote ‘no’ on ballot measures they do not understand. … It’s sort of like trying to explain the basketball playoffs to me.”

But veteran Democratic strategist Garry South doesn’t see a problem.

“The messaging here is clear: ‘Screw Trump’,” South says. “If the object is to stick it to Trump, [voter] turnout won’t be a problem.”

Gerrymandering may not be the voters’ will in California. But they may well jump at the chance to thwart Trump.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Newsom’s decision to fight fire with fire could have profound political consequences
The TK: Trial in National Guard lawsuit tests whether Trump will let courts limit authority
The L.A. Times Special: Hundreds of Californians have been paid $10,000 to relocate to Oklahoma. Did they find paradise?

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Pete Hegseth, widely considered the least qualified Defense secretary in American history, is hardly anyone’s version of the ideal Christian husband and father.

Only 45 years old, he’s been married three times.

His first marriage — to his high school sweetheart — lasted a mere four years, deteriorating after Hegseth admitted to multiple extramarital affairs.

A couple of years later, he married his second wife, with whom he had three children. During that marriage, he fathered a child with a Fox News producer who eventually became his third wife.

He paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault (he denies the assault). He routinely passed out drunk at family gatherings and misbehaved in public when inebriated, according to numerous witnesses. His own mother once accused him of being “an abuser of women,” though she later retracted her claims when Hegseth was facing Senate confirmation.

Still, the Senate’s Republican majority, cowed by President Trump, confirmed his appointment. Hegseth has two qualities that Trump prizes above all others. He is blindly loyal to the president, and he looks good on TV.

After his installation, Hegseth proceeded to fire top military brass who happened to be Black or women or both. He has restored the names of Confederate generals to Army bases (Bragg and Benning). His petty “anti-woke” crusade led him to strip the name of the assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk, a former Naval officer who served honorably, from a Navy ship. And he has considered doing the same to a ship named in honor of the abolitionist and Civil War hero Harriet Tubman. He has said that women do not belong in combat roles, and has kicked out transgender soldiers, cruelly stripping them of the pensions they earned for their service.

In March, he shared classified information about an impending American airstrike in Yemen on an unsecured Signal group chat that included his wife, on purpose, and the editor of the Atlantic, by accident.

He is, in short, the least serious man ever to lead this nation’s armed forces.

As if all that weren’t dispiriting enough, Hegseth is now in bed (metaphorically) with a crusading Christian nationalist.

Earlier this month, Hegseth made waves when he reposted on social media a CNN interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor and theocrat who is working hard to turn the clock back on the rights of every American who is not white, Christian and male.

In the interview, Wilson expounded on his patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian and homophobic views.

Women, he said, should serve as “chief executive of the home” and should not have the right to vote. (Their men can do that for them.) Gay marriage and gay sex should be outlawed once again. “We know that sodomy is worse than slavery by how God responds to it,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown. (Slavery is “unbiblical,” he avowed, though he did bizarrely defend it once, writing in 1990 a pamphlet that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.”)

When a new outpost of his church opened in Washington, D.C ., in July, Hegseth and his family were among the worshippers. CNN described Hegseth’s presence as “a major achievement” for Wilson.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” wrote Hegseth as he endorsed and reposted the interview. That is the motto of Wilson’s expanding universe, which includes his Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the center of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of more than 100 churches on four continents, parochial schools, a college, a publishing house and media platforms. “All of Christ for All of Life” is a shorthand for the belief that Christian doctrines should shape every part of life — including government, culture and education.

Wilson is a prolific author of books with titles such as “Her Hand in Marriage,” “Federal Husband,” and “Reforming Marriage.” His book “Fidelity” teaches “what it means to be a one-woman man.” Doubtful it has crossed Hegseth’s desk.

“God hates divorce,” writes Wilson in one of his books.

Given the way sexual pleasure is celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, Wilson has a peculiarly dim view of sex. I mean, how many weddings have been graced with recitations from the Song of Solomon, with its thinly disguised allusions to pleasurable sexual intimacy? (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.”)

Wilson’s world is considerably less sensual.

“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” he writes in “Fidelity.” “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Mutual sexual pleasure seems out of the question: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.” Ugh.

There is nothing particularly new here; Wilson’s ideology is just another version of patriarchal figures using religion to fight back against the equality movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They are basically the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church dressed up in respectable clothing.

“Some people may conflate Christian nationalism and Christianity because they both use the symbols and language of Christianity, such as a Bible, a cross and worship songs,” says the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism on its website. “But Christian nationalism uses the veneer of Christianity to advance its own aims — to point to a political figure, party or ideology instead of Jesus.”

What you have in people like Hegseth and Wilson are authoritarian men who hide behind their religion to execute the most unchristian of agendas.

God may hate divorce, but from my reading of the Bible, God hates hypocrisy even more.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
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Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s decision to appoint an “emergency police commissioner” in Washington is just the latest attempt to change an increasingly uncomfortable subject for the White House. Last month President Trump told the American people he was never briefed on the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2019 was charged with sex trafficking minors. We now know that Bondi told the president in May that his name appeared multiple times in those files, which traced Epstein’s operation back to the mid-1990s.

So — either you believe a city experiencing a 30-year low in crime is suddenly in need of an emergency police commissioner or you agree with Joe Rogan’s assessment: This administration is gaslighting the public regarding those files.

Now there will be pundits who will try to say Republicans are too focused on kitchen table issues to care about the Epstein controversy.

If only that were true.

According to the Consumer Price Index, goods cost more today than they did a month ago. And prices are higher than they were a year ago. It would be wonderful if Congress were in session to address kitchen table issues like grocery prices. However, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) ended the House session early to avoid a vote on the release of the Epstein files — a vote that could have displeased Trump. Those are the lengths some in the MAGA movement are willing to go to prevent the public from knowing the truth about Epstein’s clients. That is the backdrop for what is currently happening in the streets of Washington. It’s not inspired by a rise in crime, but by a fear of transparency.

It’s important to look at Bondi’s “emergency police commissioner” decision with clear, discerning eyes because the administration is purposefully conflating the issues of crime and homelessness in order to win back support from Trump’s base. While it is true that the district has made huge progress against crime, and the number of unhoused residents is far lower than a decade ago even though homeless populations nationwide have soared, the rise of conspicuous encampments around Washington is one of the reasons Virginia was almost able to lure away the city’s NBA and NHL teams. However, the nation’s capital was able to keep those sports franchises because of the leadership of Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Instead of taking over the city’s police force, perhaps Bondi should ask Bowser for some advice that could be replicated in other cities nationwide. Ask the mayor’s office what resources it might need to continue its progress on homelessness and crime. But again, this really isn’t about what benefits the people, is it? It’s really about what’s in the best interest of one person.

Now there will be pundits who will try to tell you Republicans are too focused on making this country “great” to worry about who is in the Epstein files. I ask you, when has trampling over democracy ever made us great? In Iran, we contributed to the overthrowing of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1950s, and we continue to be at odds with the nation. In Chile in the early 1970s, we moved against Salvador Allende, and it took 20 years to normalize our relationship again.

Here at home, in 2010, the state of Michigan took over the predominantly Black city of Benton Harbor under the guise of a financial emergency. The City Council was prevented from governing as state officials tried to save the city from a crippling pension deficit and other financial shortages. There was temporary reprieve, but Benton Harbor is still on economic life support. That’s because the issue wasn’t the policies of the local government. It was the lasting effects of losing so much tax revenue to a neighboring suburb due to white flight. The explanation for Benton Harbor’s woes lies in the past, not the present.

The same is true in Washington. The relatively young suburbs of McLean and Great Falls, Va., are two of the richest in the country. When you have the same financial obligations of yesteryear but less tax revenue to operate with, there will be shortfalls. And those gaps manifest themselves in many ways — rundown homes, empty storefronts, a lack of school resources.

Those are legitimate plagues affecting every major city. What Bondi is doing in Washington isn’t a cure for what ails it. And when you consider why she’s doing what she’s doing, you are reminded why people are so sick of politics.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

For President Trump, it’s all about appearances.

He’s busy with so many makeovers: The Versailles-ification of the Oval Office, which seems to sprout more gold leaf and ornamentation every time Trump assembles the media there. The paving of the Rose Garden, now Mar-a-Lago Patio North, crowded with white tables and yellow umbrellas just as at his Florida retreat. The estimated billion-dollar conversion of a Qatari luxury jet built for a king, more in keeping with Trump’s tastes than the “less impressive” Air Force One. Even a new golf cart, the six-figure armored Golf Force One. And, assuming Trump gets his way, as he mostly does, he’ll break ground soon on a $200-million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom, a veritable Hall of Mirrors nearly doubling the footprint of the White House.

The president has $257 million from ever-compliant Republicans in Congress to transform the nearby Kennedy Center into the “Trump/Kennedy Center,” as Trump immodestly suggested on Tuesday. (Meanwhile, the purported populist president has canceled grants to local arts groups across America and seeks to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, which underwrites cultural events in every state.) Even the medallions for the annual Kennedy Center Honors winners are getting a makeover — from Tiffany & Co., natch. Trump, having made himself the Kennedy Center chair after a first term in which he skipped the honors shows by popular demand, was there on Wednesday to announce the 2025 honorees.

Let’s pause here to consider just how Fox News and MAGA World would react if the president overseeing all this extravagance were named Biden, Obama or Clinton.

These preoccupations of the reality-show president are a metaphor for something much bigger, however — Trump’s virtually unchecked makeover of the entire U.S. government as well as its major institutions of education, culture, law and more, all in service of the appearance of gilded grandeur and raw power: His.

Consider recent events. After federal data showed worrying job losses in recent months — not a good look for the self-styled economic wizard — Trump fired the wonky bureaucrat who runs the Bureau of Labor Statistics in favor of a MAGA flunky disdained by economists of all stripes for his bias and ignorance. Only the best.

Cultural gems — eight Smithsonian Institution museums — are in for a Trumpian overhaul. “White House to Vet Smithsonian Museums to Fit Trump’s Historical Vision” was the Wall Street Journal headline this week. So Trump, the historical visionary who once seemed to think abolitionist Frederick Douglass was still alive and whose Homeland Security Department this week seemingly promoted a neo-Nazi book on its social media account, will curate American life and history for posterity. What could go wrong?

Though Vladimir Putin refuses to compromise or cease firing on Ukraine, making a mockery of Trump’s talk of brokering peace on Day 1, Trump plans to reward the war-crime-ing global pariah on Friday with the ultimate recognition: a summit on American soil. After all, a summit gets so much more media attention than a mere private phone call. So what if nothing comes of it, as with Trump’s first-term “summitry” with Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. It’s the televised power struts that count.

Want to look tough on crime? Trump the performance artist has militarized the nation’s capital just as he did Los Angeles, declaring a crime emergency in a city where crime is at a 30-year low. (As with the jobs numbers, the White House disputed the crime data.) The president called up 800 National Guard troops and myriad federal agents to patrol Washington, a power he declined to use for three long hours on Jan. 6, 2021, when the city actually did face rioting. Trump is so into scene-setting that he’d rather put FBI agents on the D.C. streets than leave them to their behind-the-scenes work on counterintelligence and anti-terrorism.

I don’t feel safer.

This isn’t just an anti-crime show for Trump, however. He says it’s also about beautification. “I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before,” he posted on social media. This from the president who was untroubled by his supporters defiling and defecating in the Capitol on Jan. 6. As a longtime resident, I don’t recognize the dystopian city he describes; as a citizen, I’m offended.

And of course Trump’s power play is also about fundraising. What isn’t about money for him? In an email solicitation on Tuesday, he boasted to would-be donors that he’d “LIBERATED” the capital from “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum.” You know what’s really scummy? Constant money-grubbing.

Washington and Los Angeles likely are just dry runs for Trump’s future shows of force. He’s repeatedly threatened similar crackdowns in other Democratic-run cities. And on Tuesday, the Washington Post broke the news of a Pentagon plan for a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” with 600 National Guard troops on permanent standby to deploy at Trump’s command. All of this is of dubious legality, but when has that stopped him?

Whether the subject is crime, tariffs, immigration, whatever, Trump just declares an emergency to supposedly justify his aggrandizement of power. Never mind that each emergency reflects a problem that’s long-standing and not a crisis. Absent these declarations, Trump would have to govern with Congress and pass legislation to try to actually solve problems, as the framers intended. That means time, tedium, policy details and compromise — hardly the stuff of a camera-ready wannabe action hero/strongman.

Say Trump’s orchestrated gerrymandering in Texas and other red states doesn’t work in the 2026 midterm elections and Democrats take control of the House. It’s not hard to imagine him declaring an emergency and sending in the military to seize voting machines. Trump was restrained from issuing just such an order after the 2020 election.

Yes, he’s a busy man. But you know what Trump hasn’t done? Release the Epstein files. Wouldn’t be good for appearances.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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Believe it or not, Vice President JD Vance has said a number of things over the years that I agree with.

For example, when he suggested “the American people will not tolerate another endless war” with regards to sending aid to Ukraine, I felt seen. When Vance told podcaster Theo Von “we need to release the Epstein list; that is an important thing,” I could not have agreed more. The sex trafficker received over $1.5 billion and 4,000 wire transfers to help pay for his operation. The American people should know who among us gave that monster money.

Recently Vance took to social media to point out that Republicans average 40% of the vote in California but under one redistricting scenario would be represented by only 9% of the state’s House seats.

“How can this possibly be allowed?” He pondered.

It’s a really good question — especially for Texas.

After Texas gained two spots because of population growth in 2021 — 95% of which is attributable to people of color — Gov. Greg Abbott signed off on a map that actually increased the number of districts in which most voters are white. In fact, 60% of the new state Senate districts were majority white despite white residents making up less than 40% of the population.

Vance is correct to point out there’s a dearth of Republican representation in California politics. But while Democrats have controlled the governor’s mansion and both state chambers for 11 consecutive years in the Golden State, in Texas the Republicans have held all three for 22 consecutive years — in large part because of the type of gerrymandering Vance denounced. (In California, it’s hard to fault partisan redistricting for the current mix of representation … because the state does not have partisan redistricting. Voters established an independent commission 14 years ago.)

Texas’ current map already seems to tilt in Republicans’ favor. Last year, the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, won more than 40% of the vote in the Lone Star State, and yet today Republicans hold nearly 70% of the state’s House seats. And Abbott and his MAGA cohorts in office want even more.

In one sense it is a full circle moment for Vance to complain about gerrymandering considering it was a former vice president — Elbridge Gerry — who started it. One of the nation’s founding fathers, Gerry was governor of Massachusetts when he approved a Senate seat map that the Boston Gazette lampooned as being shaped like a salamander. That’s because it was drawn in an odd way to rig the system so that it bent toward Republicans. What Vance is complaining about was started by his party and has been the country’s reality since 1812.

That’s not to suggest Democrats are not also guilty.

Between 2010 and 2020, Illinois lost roughly 18,000 people. That reduction cost the state a House seat and required a new congressional map. For more than a decade, Republican Adam Kinzinger represented the 16th district — a swath of land that included moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. However, after the new map was drawn by Democrats, the 16th district was erased and Kinzinger was without a district.

That is the same Kinzinger who proved to be a crucial member of the Jan. 6 committee because the war vet put his country over party. So, while Illinois Democrats were busy grabbing more power with the new map in 2021, they unknowingly forced out a moderate Republican who would prove to be one of the few conservatives in Congress to stand up for democracy. He proved not only to be an ally of democracy-oriented Democrats, but to be one of the speakers at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, a move that he and they hoped would bring out more moderates to vote against Donald Trump.

Had the Democrats kept his district intact, perhaps they would have had an ally in the House fighting President Trump’s overreach. Remember in May when Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed the House by a single vote?

Therein lies the true danger of gerrymandering.

It’s not about what is snuffed out today but what is prevented from happening in an unforeseen future. Kinzinger voted with Trump 90% of the time, including against the first impeachment. Looking at that, I don’t blame Democrats for seeing him as a political foe back when they eliminated his district. However, when it mattered most, he was a democracy ally. Yet by then, he was seen as a doomed political figure because of gerrymandering. Sophocles himself couldn’t have written a more tragic tale of self-defeating hubris.

So yes, JD Vance has said a number of things over the years that I agree with: no endless wars, release the Epstein files, stop the gerrymandering. I agreed with the Vance who was interested in fighting for democracy. But to appease his boss, he’s retreated from principled stances. How the world has changed, and he with it.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was the last commander in chief born a British subject and the first member of the Whig Party to win the White House. He delivered the longest inaugural address in history, nearly two hours, and had the shortest presidency, being the first sitting president to die in office, just 31 days into his term.

Oh, there is one more bit of trivia about the man who gave us the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison was the last politician to lose his first presidential election and then win the next one (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson managed that before him). Richard Nixon lost only to win way down the road. (Grover Cleveland and Trump are the only two to win, lose and then win again.)

Everyone else since Harrison’s era who lost on the first try and ran again in the next election lost again. Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Thomas Dewey ran twice and lost twice. Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan each ran three times in a row and lost (Clay ran on three different party tickets). Voters, it seems, don’t like losers.

These are not encouraging results for Kamala Harris, who announced last week she will not be running for governor in California, sparking speculation that she wants another go at the White House.

But history isn’t what she should worry about. It’s the here and now. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. It’s net favorability ( 30 points) is nearly triple the GOP’s (11 points). The Democratic Party is more unpopular than any time in the last 35 years. When Donald Trump’s unpopularity with Democrats should be having the opposite effect, 63% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the party.

Why? Because Democrats are mad at their own party — both for losing to Trump and for failing to provide much of an obstacle to him now that he’s in office. As my Dispatch colleague Nick Cattogio puts it, “Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.”

It’s not all Harris’ fault. Indeed, the lion’s share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again.

Harris’ dilemma is that she symbolizes Democratic discontent with the party. That discontent isn’t monolithic. For progressives, the objection is that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough. For the more centrist wing of the party, the problem is the Democrats are fighting for the wrong things, having lurched too far left on culture war and identity politics. Uniting both factions is visceral desire to win. That’s awkward for a politician best known for losing.

Almost the only reason Harris was positioned to be the nominee in 2024 was that she was a diversity pick. Biden was explicit that he would pick a woman and, later, an African American running mate. And the same dynamic made it impossible to sideline her when Biden withdrew.

Of course, most Democrats don’t see her race and gender as a problem, and in the abstract they shouldn’t. Indeed, every VP pick is a diversity pick, including the white guys. Running mates are chosen to appeal to some part of a coalition.

So Harris’ problem isn’t her race or sex; it’s her inability to appeal to voters in a way that expands the Democratic coalition. For Democrats to win, they need someone who can flip Trump voters. She didn’t lose because of low Democratic turnout, she lost because she’s uncompelling to a changing electorate.

Her gauzy, often gaseous, rhetoric made her sound like a dean of students at a small liberal arts college. With the exception of reproductive rights, her convictions sounded like they were crafted by focus groups, at a time when voters craved authenticity. Worse, Harris acquiesced to Biden’s insistence she not distance herself from him.

Such clubby deference to the establishment combined with boilerplate pandering to progressive constituencies — learned from years of San Francisco and California politics — makes her the perfect solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Her choice to appear on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” for her first interview since leaving office was telling. CBS recently announced it was terminating both Colbert and the show, insisting it was purely a business decision. But the reason for the broadcast network’s decision stemmed in part from the fact that Colbert narrow-casts his expensive show to a very small, very anti-Trump slice of the electorate.

“I don’t want to go back into the system. I think it’s broken,” Harris lamented to Colbert, decrying the “naïve” and “feckless” lack of “leadership” and the “capitulation” of those who “consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy.”

That’s all catnip to Colbert’s ideologically committed audience. But that’s not the audience Democrats need to win. And that’s why, if Democrats nominate her again, she’ll probably go down in history as an answer to a trivia question. And it won’t be “Who was the 48th president of the United States?”

@JonahDispatch

Last week, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, who shows more fealty to President Trump than to the U.S. Constitution she swore to uphold, filed a complaint against the only federal judge who has initiated contempt proceedings against the government for defying his orders.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, she alleged, had undermined the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary by making “improper public comments” about Trump to a group of federal judges that included Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

What is Boasberg alleged to have said?

No transcript has emerged, but according to Bondi’s complaint, at a March session of the Judicial Conference of the United States, Boasberg is alleged to have expressed “a belief that the Trump Administration would ‘disregard rulings of the federal courts’ and trigger ‘a constitutional crisis.’ ”

The Judicial Conference is the perfect place to air such concerns. It is the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, and twice a year about two dozen federal judges, including the Supreme Court chief justice, meet to discuss issues relevant to their work. Recently, for example, they created a task force to deal with threats of physical violence, which have heightened considerably in the Trump era. But nothing that happens in their private sessions could reasonably be construed as “public comments.”

“The Judicial Conference is not a public setting. It’s an internal governing body of the judiciary, and there is no expectation that what gets said is going to be broadcast to the world,” explained former U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel, who spent seven years as director of the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, a kind of think tank for the judiciary. I reached out to Fogel because he is part of a coalition of retired federal judges — the Article III Coalition of the nonpartisan civic education group Keep Our Republic — whose goal is to defend the independence of the judiciary and promote understanding of the rule of law.

Bondi’s complaint accuses Boasberg of attempting to “transform a routine housekeeping agenda into a forum to persuade the Chief Justice and other federal judges of his preconceived belief that the Trump Administration would violate court orders.”

You know how they say that every accusation is a confession in Trump World?

A mere four days after Boasberg raised his concerns to fellow federal judges, the Trump administration defied his order against the deportation of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.

You probably remember that one. A plane carrying the deportees was already in the air, and despite the judge’s ruling, Trump officials refused to order its return. “Oopsie,” tweeted El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele after it landed. “Too late!”

Thus began the administration’s ongoing pattern of ignoring or flouting the courts in cases brought against it. It’s not as if the signs were not there. “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” Trump wrote on social media in February, paraphrasing Napoleon Bonaparte, the dictatorial 19th century emperor of France.

In June, Erez Reuveni, a career Department of Justice attorney who was fired when he told a Maryland judge the government had deported someone in error, provided documents to Congress that implicated Emil Bove, Trump’s one-time criminal defense attorney, in efforts to violate Boasberg’s order to halt the deportation of the Venezuelans. According to Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint, Bove, who was acting deputy attorney general at the time, said the administration should consider telling judges who order deportations halted, “F— you.”

Bove denied it. And last week, even though other Justice Department whistleblowers corroborated Reuveni’s complaint, Bove was narrowly confirmed by the Senate to a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge.

“The Trump Administration has always complied with all court orders,” wrote Bondi in her complaint against Boasberg. This is laughable.

A July 21 Washington Post analysis found that Trump and his appointees have been credibly accused of flouting court rulings in a third of more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling. The cases have involved immigration, and cuts to the federal funding and the federal work force. That record suggests, according to the Post, “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.”

Legal experts told the Post that this pattern is unprecedented and is a threat to our system of checks and balances at a moment when the executive branch is asserting “vast powers that test the boundaries of the law and Constitution.”

It’s no secret that Trump harbors autocratic ambitions. He adores Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has transformed the Hungarian justice system into an instrument of his own will and killed off the country’s independent media. “It’s like we’re twins,” Trump said in 2019, after hosting Orbán at the White House. Trump has teased that he might try to seek an unconstitutional third term. He de-legitimizes the press. His acolytes in Congress will not restrain him. And now he has trained his sights on the independent judiciary urging punishment of judges who thwart his agenda.

On social media, he has implied that Boasberg is “a radical left lunatic,” and wrote, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

Some of Trump’s lapdogs in the House immediately introduced articles of impeachment (which are likely to go nowhere).

Roberts was moved to rebuke Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he said in a statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Some described his words as “stern.” I found them to be rather mild, considering the damage Trump’s rhetoric inflicts on the well-being of judges.

“It’s part of a longer term pattern of trying to … weaken the ability of the judiciary to put checks on executive power, ” Fogel told me. He is not among those who think we are in a constitutional crisis. Yet.

“Our Constitution has safeguards in it,” Fogel said. “Federal judges have lifetime tenure. We are in a period of Supreme Court jurisprudence that has given the executive a lot of leeway, but I don’t think it’s unlimited.”

I wish I shared his confidence.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian

It’s been quite the summer for Lakers jealousy, hasn’t it?

For example, in July, Bleacher Report left Kobe Bryant — the fourth-leading scorer in NBA history — off its Top 10 all-time player list. In June, when the Buss family sold the franchise to Mark Walter for a historic $10 billion, Lakers haters immediately took to social media to say which teams were worth more. Now we are in August, and every NBA TV show and podcast has a segment to address the comments Philadelphia 76ers executive Daryl Morey made to the Athletic about the Lakers’ 2020 NBA championship against the Miami Heat:

“Had the Rockets won the title, I absolutely would have celebrated it as legitimate, knowing the immense effort and resilience required.… Yet, everyone I speak to around the league privately agrees that it doesn’t truly hold up as a genuine championship.”

Given the historic circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic that year, to view that championship as “less than” because teams did not travel during it and fans were not present is akin to discounting NFL championships or World Series titles won during World War II because the rosters were thinner because of enlistments.

Morey suggested that victory should come with an asterisk as if the playoffs during a once-in-a-century global pandemic were not as challenging as in typical years. Different dynamic, yes — but easier? He has since walked his comments back, but you know what they say about genies and bottles. Besides, it’s not as if he’s alone in his Lakers disrespect. There are plenty of fans and former players who are quick to point out what the team did not do in that postseason because they don’t appreciate what that championship required.

Beginning with courage.

It’s been nearly five years since the Lakers won title No. 17 inside the $200-million logistics behemoth referred to as the Bubble, so maybe some of us forgot the details. Infectious disease experts, the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, the league office, the players’ union, ESPN and many other corporations all came together during a time when we had far more questions about COVID than answers.

From when NBA play stopped in March 2020 to when play inside the Bubble began that July, the country had lost more than 140,000 people to the disease. When bubble play ended in October, it was above 206,000, and many cities were running out of places to store the dead.

Far too often we forget that fame and fortune do not protect a person from problems or heartache. We forget that being a professional athlete does not protect you from the rest of the shared human experience. All-Star center Karl-Anthony Towns lost his mother to COVID that April and seven other relatives over the course of the pandemic. Towns, who turns 30 in November, was himself hospitalized in early 2021 because of the virus.

You’re not supposed to put an asterisk on a sports championship won during the worst of times. You’re supposed to use an exclamation point to honor the mental and emotional dexterity it took. The months of isolation — away from family and friends, away from the routines that made them the athletes they are. Daily testing to guarantee the safety of other players as well as coaches and administrative staff. And while not having to travel to a hostile arena nullified the “road game” in the playoffs, it also took away “home court” from a Lakers team that had the best record in the Western Conference. A team that had just beat the other two title favorites — the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Clippers — less than a week before the world shut down.

One day, Morey is going to look back on his comments about the Lakers title in the Bubble with shame. Not because he’s wrong in reporting the disrespect others in the league have expressed but because he chose to give that rhetoric oxygen. Morey and others have long had such jealousy of the Lakers, but this was the summer they turned petty.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

MAGA has a problem, in the form of Donald Trump. Put simply: MAGA wants to define what MAGA (or “America first”) means, and Donald Trump wants it to mean whatever he says at any given moment.

I should offer a little definitional clarity and political nuance. Make America Great Again means different things to different people. The Trump coalition is not monolithic, it contains factions that do not necessarily consider themselves to be MAGA. But as shorthand, MAGA is an identifiably distinct bloc on the right, and it’s the dominant faction in the broader GOP coalition. Its internal diversity notwithstanding, it still has a worldview or ideology. And the MAGA faithful are increasingly frustrated by the fact that Trump doesn’t always share, or prioritize, that ideology.

They believed that if you could just “let Trump be Trump” he would follow their conception of MAGA. In Ronald Reagan’s first term, many movement conservatives were frustrated by what they perceived as the Gipper’s drift toward centrism. They blamed moderates in the administration. “Let Reagan be Reagan” became a rallying cry on the right.

“It’s a piece of conventional wisdom on the new American right that Donald Trump struggled in his first term because he hired the wrong people — old-think Bush Republicans, figures like Rex Tillerson and Steven Mnuchin, who didn’t have a populist bone in their bodies,” the news website Semafor’s Ben Smith offers in an astute analysis.

As a result, Smith continues, “Trump’s most passionate supporters weren’t going to make that mistake again. They created initiatives like American Moment, Project 2025, and others aimed at grooming and credentialing a cadre of MAGA appointees. When Trump took office, the America Firsters moved en masse into the Department of Defense. Big Tech avengers seized the antitrust apparatus. Conspiracy-minded podcasters took over the FBI.

“And yet — just as Trump often ignored his conventional advisers in the first term, he’s stunned loyalists by sweeping aside this carefully assembled apparat in 2025.”

Trump said as much to the Atlantic magazine last month: “I think I’m the one that decides” what “America first” means.

“It turns out that personnel isn’t policy,” the executive director of the American Conservative, Curt Mills, “glumly” told Smith. The idea that “personnel is policy” is another Reagan-era mantra; put Reaganites in important positions and you’ll get Reaganite policies. Putting Trumpists in powerful positions doesn’t yield the same results.

Immigration hawks have been panicking over the president’s suggestion that farm and hotel workers should be excluded from his deportation schemes. As Trump told Fox News, “I’m on both sides of the thing.” Foreign policy “restrainers” were beclowned by his support of Israel’s strikes on Iran and his apparent about-face on helping Ukraine.

On China, Trump’s been a hawk as promised, except when he hasn’t, allowing NVIDIA to sell chips to China, and ignoring the law by refusing to sell or shutter TikTok.

Then there’s the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco, which has bedeviled Trump for weeks. It’s intensity and durability can best be explained by the fact that it divides those who define Trumpism as loyalty to Trump and those who believe that loyalty would be, must be rewarded by a cleansing of corrupt globalist elite — or something.

In short, there is no “Trumpism” that is an analogue to Reaganism. Reaganism is a philosophical approach. What defines Trump’s reign is better understood as a psychological phenomenon both as an explanation of his behavior and of his fans’ cultish and performative loyalty. To the extent Trump has a philosophy it is to follow his instincts, which are most powerfully informed first by his own ego but also the dramaturgy of professional wrestling, reality TV and Norman Vincent Peale’s prosperity gospel.

He’s said many times that he considers unpredictability a virtue in itself, which by definition means he is going to disappoint anyone who expects philosophical coherence. When Trump was a bull in a China shop, the people most excited by the sound of breaking vases and dishware assumed there was a broader method to the madness. But now the same people are learning that Trump won’t be saddled by his fans any more than he is by norms.

This was always going to be the case (as I noted in 2017), but what adds to MAGA’s frustration is that anyone can see and copy the bull-handling techniques that are most likely to work. Compliment him, call him “daddy,” celebrate his genius and expertise, and you too can manipulate him with at least moderate success.

Perhaps most significant, it’s becoming clear that a movement defined by loyalty to a mercurial personality is bound to split apart once that personality leaves the stage — if not sooner.

X: @JonahDispatch

SACRAMENTO — In fighting President Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom reminds me of actor Gene Hackman’s hard-nosed character in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Hackman plays a take-no-prisoners FBI agent, Rupert Anderson, who is investigating the disappearance of three young civil rights workers in racially segregated 1964 Mississippi. His partner and boss is stick-by-the-rules agent Alan Ward, played by Willem Dafoe.

The 1988 film is loosely based on a true story.

The two agents eventually find the victims’ murdered bodies and apprehend the Ku Klux Klan killers after Anderson persuades Ward to discard his high-road rule book in dealing with uncooperative local white folks.

“Don’t drag me into your gutter, Mr. Anderson,” Ward sternly tells his underling initially.

Anderson shouts back: “These people are crawling out of the SEWER, MR. WARD! Maybe the gutter’s where we oughta be.”

And it’s where they go. Only then do they solve the case.

Newsom contends Trump is playing gutter politics by pressuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the GOP-controlled Legislature to redraw the state’s U.S. House seats in an effort to elect five additional Republicans in next year’s midterm elections. House seats normally are redrawn only at the beginning of a decade after the decennial census.

Democrats need to gain just three net seats to retake control of the House and end the GOP’s one-party rule of the federal government.

Trump is trying to prevent that by browbeating Texas and other red states into gerrymandering their Democrat-held House districts into GOP winners.

Republicans currently hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats. Democrats have 12.

In California, it’s just the opposite — even more so. Out of 52 seats, Democrats outnumber Republicans 43 to 9, with room to make it even more lopsided.

“We could make it so that only four Republicans are left,” says Sacramento-based redistricting guru Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.

Mitchell already is crafting potential new maps in case Newsom follows through with his threat to retaliate against Texas by redrawing California’s districts to help Democrats gain five seats, neutralizing Republican gains in the Lone Star State.

Newsom and the Legislature would be seizing redistricting responsibility from an independent citizens’ commission that voters created in 2010. They took the task away from lawmakers because the politicians were acting only in their own self-interest, effectively choosing their own voters. As they do in Texas and most states, particularly red ones.

But the governor and Democrats would be ignoring California voters’ will — at least as stated 15 years ago.

And Newsom would be down in the political gutter with Trump on redistricting. But that doesn’t seem to bother him.

“They’re playing by a different set of rules,” Newsom recently told reporters, referring to Trump and Republicans. “They can’t win by the traditional game. So they want to change the game. We can act holier than thou. We could sit on the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be. Or we can recognize the existential nature that is the moment.”

Newsom added that “everything has changed” since California voters banned gerrymandering 15 years ago.

That’s indisputable given Trump’s bullying tactics and his inhumane domestic policies.

“I’m not going to be the guy that said, ‘I could have, would have, should have,’” Newsom continued. “I’m not going to be passive at this moment. I’m not going to look at my kids in the eyes and say, ‘I was a little timid.’”

Newsom’s own eyes, of course, are on the White House and a potential 2028 presidential bid. He sees a national opportunity now to attract frustrated Democratic voters who believe that party leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against Trump.

Newsom continued to echo Hackman’s script Friday at a news conference in Sacramento with Texas Democratic legislators.

Referring to Trump and Texas Republicans, Newsom asserted: “They’re not screwing around. We cannot afford to screw around. We have to fight fire with fire.”

But yakking about redrawing California’s congressional maps is easy. Actually doing it would be exceedingly difficult.

“Texas can pass a plan tomorrow. California cannot,” says Tony Quinn, a former Republican consultant on legislative redistricting.

Unlike in California, there’s no Texas law that forbids blatant gerrymandering.

California’s Constitution requires redistricting by the independent commission.

Moreover, a 1980s state Supreme Court ruling allows only one redistricting each decade, Quinn says.

Trying to gerrymander California congressional districts through legislation without first asking the voters’ permission would be criminally stupid.

Newsom would need to call a special election for November and persuade voters to temporarily suspend the Constitution, allowing the Legislature to redraw the districts.

Or the Legislature could place a gerrymandered plan on the ballot and seek voter approval. But that would be risky. A specific plan could offer several targets for the opposition — the GOP and do-gooder groups.

In either case, new maps would need to be drawn by the end of the year to fit the June 2026 primary elections.

Mitchell says polling shows that the independent commission is very popular with voters. Still, he asserts, “there’s something in the water right now. There’s potential that voters will not want to let Trump run ramshackle while we’re being Pollyannish.”

“The reality is that a lot of Democrats would hit their own thumb with a hammer if they thought it would hurt Trump more.”

Mitchell also says that California could out-gerrymander Texas by not only weakening current GOP seats but by strengthening competitive Democratic districts. Texas doesn’t have that opportunity, he says, because its districts already have been heavily gerrymandered.

Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio says Newsom is “trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube” and doubts it will work. “Unilaterally disarming was a mistake.

“But Newsom’s not wrong. They play hardball. We don’t.”

Newsom and California Democrats should fight Trump and Texas Republicans in the MAGA gutter, using all weapons available.

As Hackman’s character also says: “Don’t mean s— to have a gun unless you (sic) ready to use it.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Texas Republicans aim to redraw House districts at Trump’s urging, but there’s a risk
The TK: The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived
The L.A. Times Special: Trump’s top federal prosecutor in L.A. struggles to secure indictments in protest cases

Until next week,
George Skelton

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There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.

In elementary school, “Good Times” was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter’s portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his Michael from fiction to family for me.

By middle school, I was no longer wearing cornrows like Gene Anthony Ray, but I tried everything else to be like his character Leroy from the television show “Fame.” For some of my classmates, the performing arts were a fun way to express themselves, and the show was inspirational. For me, it was my way out of the hood, and Leroy was the blueprint. Through the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, I was able to take professional dance lessons for free and ultimately earned a dance scholarship for college.

But it wasn’t a linear journey. Despite being gifted, I struggled academically and required summer classes to graduate from high school. That’s why I connected with Theo, whose challenges in the classroom were one of the running jokes on “The Cosby Show.” The family never gave up on him, and more importantly, he didn’t stop trying.

Through the jokes about his intelligence, the coming-of-age miscues (and the dyslexia diagnosis), the storylines of Theo — like those of Leroy and Michael — often reflected struggles I foolishly thought no one else was experiencing when I was growing up. It is only through distance and time are we able to see moments like those more clearly. In retrospect, the three of them were like knots I held onto on a rope I had no idea I was climbing.

This is why the Black community’s response to the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner this week isn’t solely rooted in nostalgia but also in gratitude. We recognize the burden he’s been carrying, so that others could climb.

When “The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984, there were no other examples of a successful two-parent Black family on air. We were on television but often trauma and struggle — not love and support — were at the center of the narratives. So even though Black women had been earning law degrees since the 1800s — beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872 — and Black men were becoming doctors before that, the initial response from critics was that the show’s premise of a doctor-and-lawyer Black couple was not authentically Black.

That narrow-minded worldview continued to hang over Hollywood despite the show’s success. In 1992, after nearly 10 years of “The Cosby Show” being No. 1 — and after the success of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Coming to America” — the Eddie Murphy-led project “Boomerang” was panned as unrealistic because the main characters were all Black and successful. The great Murphy took on the Los Angeles Times directly in a letter for its critique on what Black excellence should look like.

However, Black characters like Michael, Leroy and Theo had been taking on the media since the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” painted all of us as threats in 1915. It could not have been easy for Warner, being the face of so much for so many at an age when a person is trying to figure out who he is. And because he was able to do so with such grace, Warner’s Theo defined Blackness simply by being what the world said we were not. This sentiment is embodied in his last interview, when he answered the question of his legacy by saying: “I will be able to leave this Earth knowing and people knowing that I was a good person.”

In the end, that is ultimately what made his character, along with Leroy and Michael, so important to the Black community. It wasn’t the economic circumstances or family structure of the sitcoms that they all had in common. It was their refusal to allow the ugliness of this world to tear them down. To change their hearts or turn their light into darkness. They maintained their humanity and in the process gave so many of us a foothold to keep climbing higher.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

Donald Trump has now thoroughly sullied the office of the presidency.

I’m not talking about the Oval Office, with its new, gaudy gilt trappings that seem to spread by the day, as if the famously nocturnal president multitasks there while others sleep, tapping out his nasty late-night social media screeds between applying more layers of the gold leaf fit for a king. Those golden geegaws are simply Trump’s literal stain on the Oval Office.

I’m talking about the figurative taint: What Trump does and says there by day, in full view of the media cameras, reporters and fawning retainers invited for his performances. With that behavior he besmirches not just the actual Oval Office but the very idea of the office of the president of the United States.

Who can forget, as much as one would like to, Trump’s bullying humiliation of Ukraine’s war-hero President Volodymyr Zelensky in February, and, in May, his premeditated attack on President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, with false claims of that nation’s genocide against white Afrikaner farmers?

But Trump’s performative power play on Tuesday arguably tops them all for shame. Alas, this time his target — President Obama — wasn’t present to push back. The bully wouldn’t dare get in Obama’s face, knowing his predecessor’s counterpunch against the lies could be a knockout. (In Obama’s presence, in fact, Trump is all cringey banter and bonhomie, as at Jimmy Carter’s funeral earlier this year, when the other former presidents snubbed him.)

The word “unprecedented” is used a lot, justifiably, to describe Trump’s actions, but never was it more apt: The sitting president baselessly alleged that the former president was “treasonous” — a crime punishable by death — and all but ordered his law-enforcement minions to arrest, prosecute and imprison the man.

(Apparently Trump, convicted fraudster and adjudicated sexual abuser, forgot that last year — to avoid pre-election trials tied to his alleged crimes involving Jan. 6 and classified documents — he’d persuaded a deferential Supreme Court to give presidents virtual immunity from criminal prosecution. Narcissist that he is, perhaps Trump thinks the egregious ruling only applied to him, not to Obama and every other president past and future.)

“He’s guilty. This was treason,” Trump pronounced of Obama, falsely reviving conspiracies that the then-president and his inner circle lied about Russia’s pro-Trump meddling in the 2016 campaign as a way of undermining Trump’s legitimacy. But for eight years, Vladimir Putin’s 2016 election interference has been a well-established fact, documented by multiple investigations, including one led by then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who’s now Trump’s secretary of State.

As Trump fulminated against Obama, seated beside him in the Oval Office’s familiar wingback chairs was yet another foreign dignitary, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., making him just the latest witness to how fully Trump has extinguished the United States’ beacon as a global exemplar of democratic norms and peaceful transfers of power.

Yes, Trump’s rant against Obama as well as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats was yet another of his manic attempts over the past three weeks to distract from the morass of his handling of what’s known as the Jeffrey Epstein files — files in which his name appears, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The administration’s refusal to release federal records of the pedophilia and sex-trafficking investigation of the late billionaire and Trump friend — despite past promises from Trump, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Patel deputy Dan Bongino — is a mess of their own making, and the first to draw condemnation from Trump’s otherwise loyal base. That’s what’s so unnerved the president.

And yes, we should avoid taking the bait of Trump’s distractions.

But… For a president in power to falsely allege that a former president is a traitor, and to suggest that his lickspittles at the Justice Department and FBI should act against that former president, is a distraction that must command Americans’ attention.

Certainly Obama, who’s long frustrated Democrats by his reticence about criticizing Trump, thinks so. On Tuesday he had a spokesman issue a stinger of a statement.

“Out of respect for the office of the presidency,” it began, “our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one.” It pointedly alluded to Rubio’s supportive and bipartisan 2020 report to mock the “bizarre allegations” Trump is lodging.

The basis of Trump’s claims of Obama’s treason is a report released Friday by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the conspiracy-minded former Democratic congresswoman. Not coincidentally, Gabbard lately has been desperate to get back in Trump’s good graces, having fallen from favor in recent months. Her report, along with her criminal referral to the Justice Department against Obama and others, seems to have done the trick, at least for now. Trump is singing her praises.

Gabbard outlined what she calls a “treasonous conspiracy” by Obama and Democrats to bury findings that Russia did nothing to alter the 2016 result — Trump’s victory — and to promote the “hoax” that Trump owed his election to Russia. But Obama and his aides repeatedly assured Americans that Russia did not manipulate the actual 2016 vote by hacking election machinery. Instead, Obama and his team consistently held, along with subsequent investigators, that Russia’s interference was limited to an internet-based campaign of trolls and bots promoting Trump and denigrating Clinton to U.S. voters. They never claimed that meddling determined the election outcome.

Here’s the irony: Trump is building a false case against Obama to distract his restive base from the very real case involving his pal and fellow playboy Epstein, one in which he may or may not be implicated in wrongdoing, and from his failure to bring Epstein’s elite accomplices to justice. Yet by doing so, Trump is again setting up his followers for disappointment and disillusionment. Because there is no Obama case, and so no “justice” for the salivating base.

It’s a sordid quandary that Trump deserves. Too bad he’s brought it into the presidency.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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There’s a lot of schadenfreude on the right, and even more lamentation on the left, about the cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

Donald Trump leads the schadenfreude caucus. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump crowed on social media. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” (It is remarkable that a president who campaigned with a vow to end “cancel culture” is so uninhibited in his celebration of cancel culture when it’s on his terms.)

The lamentations from the left are just as exuberant, from the other direction. They hail Colbert as a heroic martyr for free expression and speaking truth to power. “Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country’s leader on TV without repercussions,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes declared.

In a sense, both sides essentially agree that Colbert was canceled because of his politics. The argument from the left is that this was unfair and even illegitimate. The illegitimate claim rests on the fact that CBS’s parent company Paramount has been trying to curry favor with the administration to gain approval for the sale of the network to Skydance Media. Shari Redstone, Paramount’s owner, approved a settlement of Trump’s dubious lawsuit against “60 Minutes” (which Colbert had criticized days earlier as a “big fat bribe”). Colbert’s scalp was a sweetener, critics claim.

I think that theory is plausible, given the timing of the decision and the way it was announced. If this was the plan all along, why not announce the decision at the 2025 upfronts and sell ads in tandem with the wind-down? That’s the way this sort of thing has been done in the past.

But Colbert’s critics on the right have an equally plausible point. Colbert made the show very political and partisan, indulging his Trump “resistance” schtick to the point where he basically cut the potential national audience in half. He leaned heavily on conventionally liberal politicians (tellingly, on the night he announced the news of his cancellation, his first guest was California Sen. Adam Schiff — a man who couldn’t get a laugh if you hit him in the face with a pie).

But both the left-wing and right-wing interpretations have some holes. The theory that this was purely a political move overlooks the fact that CBS didn’t merely fire Colbert, it’s terminating the iconic “Late Show” entirely and giving the airtime back to local affiliates. If they solely wanted to curry favor with Trump, they could have given the show to more Trump-friendly (funnier and popular with the young’ns) comedians such as Shane Gillis or Andrew Schulz. The show was reportedly losing some $40 million a year. Even if they hired someone for a quarter of Colbert’s $15- million salary, it would still be losing money.

On the right, many — Trump included — have pointed to the fact that Greg Gutfeld’s not-quite-late-night Fox show has better ratings than his competitors on the three legacy networks. That’s true, but it’s hardly as if Gutfeld is any less partisan than Colbert, Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon.

It’s also true that the titans of previous eras — Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien — tended to avoid strident partisanship. But the nostalgia-fueled idea that a more mainstream, apolitical host would garner similar audiences again gets the causality backward.

Those hosts were products of a different era, when huge numbers of Americans from across the political spectrum consumed the same cultural products. The hosts, much like news networks and newspapers, had a powerful business incentive to play it down the middle and avoid alienating large swaths of their audiences and advertisers. That era is over, forever.

Now media platforms look to garner small “sticky” audiences they can monetize by giving them exactly what they want. There’s an audience for Colbert, and for Gutfeld, but what makes the roughly 2 million to 3 million nightly viewers who love that stuff tune in makes the other 330 million potential viewers tune in to something else. The “Late Show” model — and budget — simply doesn’t work with those numbers.

Cable news, led by Fox, ushered in political polarization in news consumption, but cable itself fueled the balkanization of popular culture. Streaming and podcast platforms, led by YouTube, are turbocharging that trend to the point where media consumption is now a la carte (artificial intelligence may soon make it nigh upon bespoke).

The late-night model was built around a culture in which there was little else to watch. That culture is never coming back.

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SACRAMENTO — No outsider politicians venture into sultry South Carolina in July unless they are running for president.

Certainly not a West Coast politician. Especially a California governor who lives in delightful Marin County near wonderful cool beaches. A governor who could easily vacation at spectacular Big Sur or hike a wilderness trail into the majestic Sierra.

We can assume Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t choose South Carolina for its nightly light show of amazing fireflies or symphony of crickets. He was attracted to something so alluring that he was willing to brave skin-eating chiggers and oppressive humidity.

The lure, of course, was that South Carolina will hold one of the earliest — perhaps the first — Democratic presidential primaries in 2028. The precise calendar for contests hasn’t been set. But Newsom knows this: South Carolina propelled Joe Biden to the party’s nomination in 2020. And it provided a huge boost for Barack Obama in 2008.

“What South Carolinians saw this week as … Newsom made a two-day swing through the state was more than a highly visible candidate who probably will run for president in 2028,” wrote Andy Brack, editor, publisher and columnist at the Statehouse Report and Charleston City Paper.

“They saw a guy sweating through a white shirt in the South Carolina heat who was having fun. Yep, he seemed to enjoy engaging with voters in rural places too often forgotten by many candidates.”

Yes, Newsom, 57, loves campaigning on the stump — a whole lot more than he does toiling in the nitty-gritty of governing.

I’d only bicker with Brack’s word “probably” when characterizing Newsom’s White House bid. We’re talking semantics.

California’s termed-out governor actually has been running for months. And he’ll run as far as he can, slowly for a while and try to pick up speed down the road.

That’s conventional politics. Most candidates — especially office holders — initially claim that running for president is “the furthest thing” from their mind, then ultimately declare their candidacy with all the hoopla of a carnival barker.

OK, I admit to having been wrong about the governor in the past. I should have known better. I took him at his word. He persistently denied any interest in the presidency. “Subzero,” he asserted. But to be fair, he and reporters previously were centered on the 2024 race and the distant 2028 contest got short shrift.

I figured Newsom mostly was running for a slot on the “A” list of national political leaders. He wanted to be mentioned among the roster of top-tier potential presidents. He clearly savors the national attention.

But I’ve also always wondered whether Newsom might be leery of running for president because of his lifelong struggle with dyslexia. He could view the task with some trepidation. The governor has acknowledged having difficulty reading, especially speeches off teleprompters.

That said, he has adapted and is an articulate, passionate off-the-cuff speaker with a mind full of well-organized data. He excels on the stump — especially when he restrains a tendency to be long-winded and repetitive.

Newsom is finally starting to acknowledge the White House glimmer in his eye.

“I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he told the Wall Street Journal last month.

More recently, in a lengthy interview with conservative podcaster Shawn Ryan, Newsom said: “I’ll tell you, the more Trump keeps doing what he does, the more compelled I am to think about it.”

Newsom’s proclaimed hook for traveling to South Carolina was to “sound the alarm” about President Trump’s brutish policies and to light a fire under Democratic voters to help the party win back the U.S. House next year.

He’s again trying to establish himself as a leader of the anti-Trump resistance after several months of playing nice to the president in a losing effort to keep federal funds flowing to California.

But it’s practically inevitable that a California governor will be lured into running for president. Governors have egos and ears. They constantly hear allies and advisors telling them they could become the leader of the free world.

And, after all, this is the nation’s most populous state, with by far the largest bloc of delegates to the Democratic National Convention — 20% of those needed to win the nomination.

But there’s a flip side to this California benefit. There’s a California burden. In much of the country, we’re seen as a socialist horror with dreadful liberal policies that should never be emulated nationally.

“People who live in other states just don’t like us, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” says Democratic strategist Darry Sragow. “A Democrat from California is going to have an uphill fight no matter who they are. That’s just a reality.

“The odds [for Newsom] are pretty long, although he has a shot because the field is totally open.”

But Democratic strategist Bill Carrick — a South Carolina native — says the California burden “is exaggerated. That’s just the Republican stereotype of California. Who cares?

“If Newsom runs, he’ll be competitive. He’s smart. Good charisma. South Carolina was a good trip for him.”

Former Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future at USC, says: “Too many people write Newsom off. He has a realistic chance.

“He’s very good at pushing off against Trump. It all depends on whether he goes into the election with a message about the future. The message has to center around the economy. The two times Trump was elected he won the message war.”

Can Newsom win the nomination? Maybe. The presidency? Probably not.

But there’s no certainty about anything in an antsy country that swings from twice electing Barack Obama to twice anointing Donald Trump. Newsom is smart to roll the dice.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Forget the high road: Newsom takes the fight to Trump and his allies
The TK: Will she or won’t she? The California governor’s race waits on Kamala Harris
The L.A. Times Special: The forgotten godfather of Trump’s scorched earth immigration campaign

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Believe it or not, France has had a form of social security since the 1600s, and its modern system began in earnest in 1910, when the world’s life expectancy was just 32 years old. Today the average human makes it to 75 and for the French, it’s 83, among the highest in Europe.

Great news for French people, bad news for their pensions.

Because people are living longer, the math to fund pensions in France is no longer mathing, and now the country’s debt is nearly 114% of its GDP. Remember it was just a couple of years ago when protesters set parts of Paris on fire because President Emmanuel Macron proposed raising the age of legal retirement from 62 to 64. Well, now Prime Minister Francois Bayrou has proposed eliminating two national holidays, in an attempt to address the country’s debt.

In 2023, before Paris was burning, roughly 50,000 people in Denmark gathered outside of Parliament to express their anger over ditching one of the country’s national holidays. The roots of Great Prayer Day date all the way back to the 1600s. Eliminating it — with the hopes of increasing production and tax revenue — brought together the unions, opposing political parties and churches in a rare trifecta. That explains why a number of schools and businesses closed for the holiday in 2024 in defiance of the official change.

This week, Bayrou proposed eliminating France’s Easter Monday and Victory Day holidays, the latter marking the defeat of Nazi Germany. In a Reuters poll, 70% of respondents didn’t like the idea, so we’ll see if Paris starts burning again. Or maybe citizens will take a cue from the Danes and just not work on those days, even if the government decides to continue business as usual.

Here at home, President Trump has also floated the idea of eliminating one of the national holidays. However, because he floated the idea on Juneteenth — via a social media post about “too many non-working holidays” — I’m going to assume tax revenue wasn’t the sole motivation for his comments that day. You know, given his crusade against corporate and government diversity efforts; his refusal to apologize for calling for the death penalty for five innocent boys of color; and his approval of Alligator Alcatraz. However, while I find myself at odds with the president’s 2025 remarks about the holiday, I do agree with what he said about Juneteenth when he was president in 2020: “It’s actually an important event, an important time.”

Indeed.

While the institution of slavery enabled this country to quickly become a global power, studies show the largest economic gains in the history of the country came from slavery’s ending — otherwise known as Juneteenth. Two economists have found that the economic payoff from freeing enslaved people was “bigger than the introduction of railroads, by some estimates, and worth 7 to 60 years of technological innovation in the latter half of the 19th century,” according to the University of Chicago. Why? Because the final calculations revealed the cost to enslave people for centuries was far greater than the economic benefit of their freedom.

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus “discovered America,” civilizations had been thriving on this land for millennia. The colonizers introduced slavery to these shores two years before the first “Thanksgiving” in 1621. That was more than 50 years before King Louis XIV started France’s first pension; 60 years before King Christian V approved Great Prayer Day; and 157 years before the 13 colonies declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776.

Of all the national holidays around the Western world, it would appear Juneteenth is among the most significant historically. Yet it gained federal recognition just four years ago, and it remains vulnerable. The transatlantic slave trade transformed the global economy, but the numbers show it was Juneteenth that lifted America to the top. Which tells you the president’s hint at its elimination has little to do with our greatness and everything to do with the worldview of an elected official who was endorsed by the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan.

If it does get to the point where we — like France and Denmark — end up seriously considering cutting a holiday, my vote is for Thanksgiving. The retail industry treats it like a speed bump between Halloween and Christmas, and when history retells its origins, it’s not a holiday worth protesting to keep.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

In his BBC Sport column, England captain George Williams spreads the word about the autumn Ashes series and gives insight into the recent squad get-together.

Just 100 days are left until this England side gets the chance to taste an Ashes series again and we face Australia for the first time since 2017.

Me and Jack Welsby went down to London on Wednesday, driving round the city on a red bus and visiting some tourist sites for photos and filming.

We’re trying to grow the buzz, to get people talking about the series down there and get involved.

As players, you want to be involved in the biggest of games, and I don’t see many bigger – if any.

Even though there is still a lot of rugby to be played in Super League, to play against Australia at the end of the year is the pinnacle.

I actually don’t mind doing the press and promotion. I try to do it with a smile on my face and enjoy it, because it doesn’t last forever and I’ll soon be retired.

So I’ve got to enjoy being in the media, growing the game and being England captain, which is something I’m really proud of.

SACRAMENTO — If there were more people like George Steffes in politics, the public wouldn’t hold the institution in such low esteem.

There’d be a lot less bull and much more thoughtful debate.

Paralytic polarization would give way to problem solving.

Steffes was the kind of person who people profess to want in the halls of government power.

If more Republicans like him were in Washington, there’d be no rationalization for tyrannical ICE raids at schools and workplaces because Congress and the president would have long ago compromised on immigration reform.

The Republican Party would still be modeled after Steffes’ early mentor — pragmatic conservative Ronald Reagan — and not be the misused tool of demagogue Donald Trump.

Steffes, 90, died peacefully in his sleep in a Sacramento hospital July 6. He was admitted two weeks earlier after a painful bathroom fall. The precise cause of death was unknown at this writing, according to his wife, Jamie Khan.

He was the last remaining top advisor of Gov. Reagan who remained in Sacramento after the future president moved on — the last person around the state Capitol with firsthand, close-up knowledge of the GOP icon’s governorship. He was Reagan’s lead legislative lobbyist.

Ordinarily, Steffes would be best known around the Capitol for being a past Reagan honcho. But he’s better known for being a classy guy.

No one in Sacramento for the last 60 years — at least — has been more liked, respected and successful as a lobbyist than Steffes. He’d easily rank in the top 10. No, make that top 5.

If there were more lobbyists like Steffes, the profession wouldn’t be such a pejorative.

He didn’t try to BS governors, legislators, clients or journalists. He was a straight shooter. People trusted him.

He always had a smile, but wasn’t a backslapper.

People instantly liked him — as I did when we first met in a Santa Cruz hotel bar one night in 1966 after a day of traipsing after Reagan running for governor. Steffes was a campaign aide. I was a reporter who found him highly interesting, thoughtful and candid.

But don’t take just my word about the guy.

“He was never part of the nonsense that is characteristic of those of us in politics,” former Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown told me. “I could rely on his word about good public policy. He was knowledgeable. He knew what he was doing.”

Brown, who was elected San Francisco mayor after leaving the Legislature, recalled that Steffes helped him pass a landmark bill “eliminating a law punishing people for being gay. I had to get Republican votes. George talked to them about how it wasn’t a bad vote to cast.”

The 1975 bill, signed by new Gov. Jerry Brown, repealed a century-old law prohibiting “crimes against nature.” The measure eliminated criminal penalties for oral sex and sodomy between consenting adults.

“The biggest thing that stands out to me about Steffes is how different he was from the mean-spirited slashing politics of today,” says Kip Lipper, a chief environmental consultant for several Democratic state Senate leaders. “He was unfailingly considerate, always in good spirits. He didn’t wear his politics on his sleeve like a lot of others.”

Retired journalist Lou Cannon, who has written several Reagan biographies, recalls that after the new Republican governor took office in 1967, he continued to bash Pat Brown, the Democratic incumbent he had trounced the previous year.

“George told him, ‘Governor, that ‘s not worthy of you.’ So Reagan stopped. And he actually became quite fond of Pat Brown. George was never afraid to say to Reagan that he was wrong about something. And Reagan appreciated that.”

If only we had some White House aides with that courage and wisdom today.

Cannon adds: “One of the reasons I liked George is he didn’t bulls— you. If he couldn’t tell you something, he’d tell you he couldn’t tell ya. He was straight. Some people you interview them and you think, ‘Why did I waste my time?’”

Public relations veteran Donna Lucas says, “He set the standard for good lobbying in the Capitol.”

One Steffes rule: “He would never ask a legislator to do anything that wasn’t in their interest as well,” says Jud Clark, a former legislative staffer for Democrats and a close friend and business associate of Steffes.

Before he retired a few years ago, Steffes had a very long A-list of clients, such as American Express, Bechtel, IBM, Exxon and Union Pacific.

He also represented less lucrative clients such as newspapers, including The Times. And he advocated for some interests pro bono, mostly golf associations.

His passion was golf. And he became a golf instructor after retiring from lobbying.

“George was such a cerebral teacher,” says a pupil, Capitol Weekly editor Rich Ehisen. “He didn’t spend a lot of time correcting your elbow bend. He focused on the mental part of the game.”

Steffes once told an interviewer: “Golf offered good lessons for life. If I had a bad stroke, I can’t fix it now. It’s in the past. … Sitting and stewing [about it] saps our mental energy. Focus on what you can do to move forward, win the issue.”

But Steffes did stew about the declining state of politics.

“Politics became too polarized — Republican conservatives, Democratic liberals. The middle ground where he used to operate was disappearing,” his wife, Jamie, told me last week.

Reagan’s GOP that formed Steffes’ philosophy of political pragmatism had already disappeared. In the last election, he voted for Democrat Kamala Harris over Republican nominee Trump.

Steffes was honest even with himself — a human quality possessed by too few in politics.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Glimpse of Newsom’s presidential appeal, challenges seen during South Carolina tour
The TK: New poll finds most Californians believe American democracy is in peril
The L.A. Times Special: Six months after L.A. fires, Newsom calls for federal aid while criticizing the Trump administration

Until next week,
George Skelton

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