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Eighty years ago, though the Arsenal of Democracy had vanquished the Axis and weathered a withering Depression, the recovering American people found themselves rich in bills but short on laughs. Enter Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who debuted together on July 25, 1946.

Unlike Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, or Hope and Crosby, who relied on tightly scripted setups, this disparate yet kindred duo captured America’s heart by being viscerally, uproariously and unpredictably wild.

Martin and Lewis were the founding fathers of an anarchic, side-splitting brand of comedy that combined pratfalls, ad-libbed wordplay and a sustained demolition of the fourth floor. Orson Welles observed that the duo’s combustible zaniness was so hilarious that it made you wet your pants.

The boys cavorted about the stage, kibitzing with bandleaders and the audience alike. In between trading impromptu quips, Martin and Lewis overturned tables, cut ties, sheared suits and spritzed seltzer on one and all.

The suave, dashingly handsome Italian crooner clowning around with his gawky, rubbery Jewish buddy brought the house down every time. It was nonstop, jocular pandemonium: Commedia dell’arte 2.0.

“Saturday Night Live,” Second City, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler all owe a debt to the artists who started life as Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch.

Martin and Lewis created a novus ordo seclorum, in its way innovating like America’s founders, spawning a new comedic order of the ages.

Their alchemy was as ineffable as it was infectious. Variety’s first review of the act noted, “All they do cannot be detailed, but virtually every bit of it is good for solid laughs.” Carl Reiner similarly declared: “I saw what I thought was the funniest ad-libbed thing I had ever seen. It was a riot, and we never stopped laughing.”

In their own madcap way, Dino and Jer epitomized Cicero’s notion that comedy is the imitation of life, the mirror of custom and the image of truth.

Martin and Lewis became the monarchs of all media, conquering radio, nightclubs, television and the silver screen. In 1948, they appeared on Ed Sullivan’s first television show, “Toast of the Town.” From 1950 to 1955, the Martin-and-Lewis-hosted “Colgate Comedy Hour” frequently bested Sullivan in the ratings.

When Hollywood beckoned, the boys answered the call, cavorting, cutting up and reconfiguring reality on the silver screen. They starred in 16 films, bringing their boisterous bromance to capacity-crowd movie theaters.

Though their big-screen adventures could not capture the comedic chaos of their stage act, Martin and Lewis transformed even the most pedestrian screenplay into box-office gold. As film critic Ciara Maloney explained, “Their brilliance shines through the weakest material: the ineffable, bewitching something between them — an intimacy, an immediacy, an ingenuity — frozen in amber for those of us who would never see it in the Copacabana.”

The essence of this duo was the outré interplay between the Prince and the Putz, the Leading Man and the Monkey. Though he was the comedian by trade, Lewis fully credited Martin as the “genius” of the pairing: “He kept the center. He was the spine of the act. And the monkey was constantly attached to that spine, on the spine, next to it.”

From “Sailor Beware” to “The Stooge,” “Living It Up” and “Artists and Models,” theirs was a comedy partnership that came to symbolize America. It is little wonder that presidential historian Tevi Troy called the 1950s “The Martin and Lewis Decade.”

However, many Americans didn’t see these two celebrities as distant icons. Film critic Jenna Ipcar has described how “a perfect comedy duo will make their audience feel like a lucky participant instead of just a passive observer, a welcome guest in a secret world.” Martin and Lewis embodied that ideal.

The boys’ bittersweet final performance took place at New York’s Copacabana on July 25, 1956. Exactly 10 years after their debut in Atlantic City, N.J., Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had pioneered a new brand of comedy, soothed postwar America’s psyche and made a nation laugh again.

Rosario A. Iaconis, chairman of the Italic Institute of America, writes about Italy and its cultural influence. He is at work on a novel about Harry S. Truman.

Exploiting racism has been a profitable strategy in Hollywood since the dawn of filmmaking: 111 years ago, D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” was incredibly popular and influential, while also being so racist that it was considered controversial even in its own day.

The industry saw immediately just how lucrative fear could be. More than a century later, there is always someone in the entertainment media willing to trade in racist tropes for money, as well as an audience ready to receive them.

Two new films, “Citizen Vigilante” and “Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels,” demonstrate that streaming platforms and social media no longer simply distribute controversial content but in fact thrive on content that provokes, polarizes and sustains attention, regardless of the social cost.

Both of these xenophobic and Islamophobic films are being pushed as “anti-woke” vehicles, deliberately engineered to bypass traditional critical reception and capitalize on a fractured media ecosystem. “Citizen Vigilante,” which features an American protagonist killing dark-skinned immigrants and Muslims in an unnamed European setting, was denied a rating certificate by the German government for inciting violence. Yet despite that determination, the film secured global reach through decentralized digital distribution and high-profile promotion from Elon Musk.

Similarly, “Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels” — a campus siege narrative evoking 1980s action film nostalgia that leans heavily into outdated, post-9/11 anxieties — relies on a built-in conservative media apparatus to guarantee financial returns. The film is produced by the conservative media figure Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, which he co-founded. It is a sequel to a 2020 film that was their film company’s premiere.

But while promoters of such films frame their work as a brave rebellion, the reality is much more sinister: rehashing 40-year-old tropes while invoking conspiracy theories of Muslims bringing sharia law to America, because outrage is cheap to produce and easy to monetize.

Stories matter. Stories shape how we see one another. They influence what we love, what we celebrate, whom we trust, whom we understand and whom we fear.

Since January, the Muslim Public Affairs Council has documented a sharp escalation in threats and attacks targeting Muslims and Islamic institutions across the United States, including vandalism, shootings, bomb threats, attempted assassinations and physical assaults. These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a broader climate in which dehumanizing representation increasingly manifests as real-world violence.

Entertainment and politics increasingly employ the same tactic as one another, recycling narratives of fear and “otherness” to mobilize audiences, voters and consumers. When political leaders encourage those narratives, as President Trump recently did by amplifying and commenting on a photo of young Muslim American students in hijab, they further normalize the same stereotypes that entertainment companies have learned to monetize.

Yet while the social costs continue to mount, the economic incentives remain firmly intact. “Citizen Vigilante” earned a 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes despite receiving just a 6% critics’ score. More tellingly, it quickly climbed to the top of Amazon’s and Apple TV’s paid video-on-demand charts.

And this isn’t just a Muslim and immigrant issue — and it’s not only about who is portrayed on screens, but also who is not. Representation has been backsliding, and audiences are left with fewer opportunities to see the reality and humanity of diverse communities, making them more vulnerable to fear-based narratives.

According to a 2026 report from the nonprofit Define American, which tracks representation across television and film, Latinos account for only 23% of immigrant characters represented on screen, even though they make up more than 40% of the immigrant population in the United States. In 2020, 50% of immigrants on screen were Latino.

The industry’s defense is that whitewashed and xenophobic films reflect audience demand. But the recent research by Define American challenges this assumption. Data show that nuanced, multidimensional storytelling, in which immigrants and minority characters are woven into the fabric of everyday narratives rather than tokenized or villainized, actually leads to greater audience engagement and deeper systemic understanding.

Entertainment doesn’t simply reflect culture; it teaches us who belongs within it. Studios, distributors, streaming platforms and filmmakers all have a responsibility to reject narratives that portray immigrants as enemies and instead embrace stories that reflect the diversity and complexity of our world. At the same time — as with voters — the power ultimately rests with consumers. The choice to demand storytelling that challenges prejudice rather than profits from it belongs to all of us.

Sue Obeidi is the senior vice president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council Hollywood Bureau. Jose Antonio Vargas is the founder of Define American.

For my 50th birthday, I bought a Toyota Corolla. Wait. Is my midlife crisis car really a Corolla, the best selling and most boring model of all time?

Well, yes. And no.

I have “modded” it, or in layman’s terms, modified the stock components and tuned the engine. This is not your aunt’s Corolla. When I hit the gas, the car pulls hard and the engine buzzes as if it’s powered by a hive of killer bees.

I get thumbs-ups from Mustang drivers and cool head nods from Challenger owners. My favorite is when kids at red lights ask me to rev the engine like I’m F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.

Probably a lot of my drive-by admirers are fans of the movie “The Fast and the Furious,” which was released 25 years ago this month. Fans of modified Japanese import cars, like me, have a love-hate relationship with the $7 billion “Fast and Furious” franchise. On one hand, the movies helped popularize modified Japanese cars. People all over the world fell in love with them and the import car culture they publicized.

On the other hand, the movies left out so, so much of the story.

In Southern California in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, people lived, for the most part, phone-free. The internet was nascent — a repository for flyers and ’zines — and most websites looked like Tetris.

The fashion was baggy everything for guys and short shorts, midriffs and little backpacks for girls. The hair was outrageous. And the cars, especially Japanese import cars, had reached the pinnacle of automotive engineering.

During this era, I was in college at UCLA. I saved up and bought a red 1989 Honda CRX Si. It also had a slick five-speed manual transmission, peppy engine and nimble steering. That car got me to work and through college, and from the mountains of California to the border of Oregon. It probably helped me get girlfriends. It consoled me through breakups. It helped me move to the San Francisco Bay Area for my first grown-up job.

And then, stupidly, I sold it, and all the precious memories it carried.

Now when I hit a loopy freeway interchange at night and my GR Corolla carves through the turns, it’s 1996 and I’m cruising in my CRX, getting pho in San Gabriel or rushing to a flyer party at Naga in Long Beach. That’s the magic of certain cars. A regular car takes you from place to place. A special car takes you back in time.

To be completely honest, I bought the CRX to fit in.

The ’90s import car scene was as diverse as Southern California. But there’s no doubt it started with Asian Americans (specifically Japanese Americans in the South Bay city of Gardena) who were influenced by modified car culture in Japan. Soon, Asian American kids all over the region were taking their inexpensive, underpowered four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive Honda Civics (our parents preferred Japanese reliability over American muscle) and turning them into street rockets.

Not only were they building race cars from scratch, they were also building one of my first experiences with a collective Asian American identity: one that wasn’t overtly about politics and activism, or immigration and assimilation. It was about Asian American joy. It was Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese Americans building cool-looking, fast cars. It was kids stereotyped as nerds going to parties where the awful stereotype of Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” was shredded into rubber and obliterated by exhaust blasts.

At the time, the Asian Americans we saw in the mainstream media were negligible or offensive, especially for Vietnamese Americans like me. But in import car culture, I saw, for maybe the first time, Asian guys and Asian girls in a centered and even glamorous light.

We made our own cars and our own car shows. We raced each other and then got fast (with turbos, superchargers and nitrous oxide) and raced others. And we won. We published our own magazines, built our own automotive businesses and, for good and bad, promoted our own outlaw street racer image and our own beauty standard. In those 1990s clubs and car shows, you could see and feel that Asian Americans weren’t assimilating culture. We were creating it.

“The Fast and the Furious” picked up on that. Based on a 1998 Vibe magazine article about street racing import cars in New York, the film was transplanted to Southern California. But it got so many details glaringly wrong. Its street races looked like street raves on major, four-wide roads packed with pedestrians. The races of our scene were clandestine, underground events in industrial, under-policed areas, where cars faced off two at a time.

But the most egregious and inexcusable Hollywood crime to me is that “The Fast and the Furious” whitewashed Asian Americans, the creators of this world, out of starring roles. The Korean American actor Rick Yune appears in the movie, sure — but he plays the villain, Johnny Tran, a guy who hates Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto for a crime deal gone bad (understandable) and for sleeping with his sister (ditto). Of course, in a tradition that goes back to “Madame Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon,” Tran dies at the end, shot dead by the blond-haired, blue-eyed hero, Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner.

A few months ago, seeking a mechanic to mod my Corolla, I was referred to an auto shop in Garden Grove aka Little Saigon. The guy who sent me asked me, “Do you even know who’s working on your car?”

“No,” I replied.

He told me the name, and I Googled it.

Apparently, back in the ’90s, this Vietnamese American mechanic from Orange County had one of the fastest Honda Civics in the world. A true OG of the import car scene modified my car with his own hands. What an honor, and what a connection to the past.

This import car story ends in a full poetic justice circle. As a pioneer and legend of the real-life import car scene, my mechanic wasn’t the villain. He was the hero. He was the fastest, and his car was the most furious.

That’s the heart of my GR Corolla journey. Asian Americans created import car culture. We all deserve to be the hero of our own story.

Ky-Phong Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from Long Beach. He is a professional artist fellow with the Arts Council for Long Beach. This article was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.

More than any other artist in the 20th century, David Hockney defined Los Angeles in the public imagination. When he first arrived in January 1964, age 26, his mental image of the city had been forged not by art but by Hollywood movies, which he had watched as a young boy in Yorkshire, England. In later life, he often recollected the sharp-edged shadows cast by the Californian sunlight in movies such as Laurel and Hardy’s “Big Business.

Before he ever went to L.A., Hockney — who died Thursday at 88 — knew that he would love it. Writing about his first descent into the city, he recalled how “as I flew over San Bernardino and looked down — and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I’ve ever been arriving at any other city, including New York.” By this time, the glamour of Hollywood had been compounded by other influences, including the homoerotic magazines that an American friend had given him at the Royal College of Art in London. Titles such as Physique Pictorial, published in L.A. by the pioneering “beefcake” photographer Bob Mizer, held out a promise of California as a paradise of rippling men and permanent sunshine. A darker, no less thrilling image of the city had arisen from Hockney’s reading of “City of Night,” the 1963 novel by John Rechy that tells the story of a hustler in the gay underworld of downtown L.A.

Los Angeles itself felt young to Hockney. He loved the light, the architecture, the sense of space and the sense of possibility — not least the possibility of greater sexual freedom. West Hollywood boasted a large gay bar, the Red Raven on Melrose Avenue, that was unlike anything he had found in London or New York. There was also the lure of the beach, with its pageant of sculpted physiques. Venice Beach struck him as a more body-beautiful version of London’s Portobello Road.

Before long, his work shifted from generic fantasies of the city (a young man showering in Beverly Hills, for instance) to vivid portrayals of its real-life pools, palm trees, architecture and people. American artists such as Edward Ruscha and Edward Kienholz were producing their own canonical images of L.A. in these years, but for Hockney, there were no artistic precedents — “no ghosts,” as he later put it — to live up to. “People then didn’t even know what it looked like,” he once said. “And when I was there, they were still finishing up some of the big freeways.… I suddenly thought: ‘My God, this place needs its Piranesi, Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am!’ ”

He was true to his word, even if his luminous, serene images of the city were a far cry from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s feverish visions of Baroque Rome. “Beverly Hills Housewife” (1966), a portrait of a pink-dressed collector in her modernist home, marked the onset of a realist style that would define Hockney’s work for the next decade. This era gave rise to paintings that became icons of their time and place. Among them were “A Bigger Splash” (1967), which was based on a magazine cover that he came across on a newsstand, and “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” (1968, sold last year at Christie’s New York for $44.3 million). Inspired by Hans Holbein, this portrait of the English novelist and his artist partner was one of the first celebratory portrayals of a gay couple. Hockney would later recount how Isherwood proclaimed: “Oh David, we’ve so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we’re both from the north of England.” Hockney’s beloved American boy at this time was Peter Schlesinger, a young artist he had met while teaching at UCLA in the summer 1966 — and a recurring presence in the early L.A. pictures.

According to Norman Rosenthal, who curated a major survey of Hockney’s art at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris last year: “It is astonishing that a boy from a poor family in Bradford became the person — partly because of his gayness, but also his talent — who defined what everybody now thinks of as California. L.A. had no real image in the world before then, unlike New York.”

Despite his enchantment with Los Angeles, Hockney didn’t settle there until 1978, after a decade of bouncing between America and Europe. In the summer of 1979 he moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, and soon adorned its pool with swishing strokes of blue paint. In the early 1980s, he converted the paddle tennis court into a studio. The meandering routes and Mediterranean scenery of the Hills were a fresh source of amazement, giving rise to monumental depictions of Mulholland Drive and Nichols Canyon in a newly abstract style.

By this time, the city was deeply familiar — a second home — and he had a close circle of friends around him who included the patron Betty Freeman (subject of “Beverly Hills Housewife”), the designer Gregory Evans, the gallery owner Nicholas Wilder and the film producer Joe Simon. “L.A. had represented a whole new world for him,” says Simon, who remained in regular contact with the artist until his final days. “He just loved the light. He was like a kid in a candy store when he first came. But David was all about the work. Everything came back to that.”

In recent decades, Hockney’s name had become synonymous with the landscapes of his native Yorkshire, which he began painting prolifically in the early 2000s. But Los Angeles never lost its newness and promise. His house in the Hills remained a sanctuary until his final years, when he was too frail to travel. L.A. was where he had come of age, and it remained an indelible part of his life and psyche — not least in terms of its egalitarian spirit and its tendency toward the horizontal. “The great thing about Hockney was that he spoke to everybody,” says Rosenthal. “Few artists of his world and his generation could do that.”

James Cahill, a novelist and an art critic, is the author of, among other books, “David Hockney” and the forthcoming “The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool.”

After a decade of Trumpism, it should come as no surprise that President Trump’s ethos (presenting scandal as strength, outrage as authenticity and public disgrace as evidence you’re a “fighter”) has trickled down into congressional campaigns of both parties.

In Maine, for example, controversial oysterman and veteran Graham Platner, a Democrat, appears poised to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins, after incumbent Gov. Janet Mills’ failure to launch led her to drop out of the Senate primary.

Under old “pre-Trump” rules, Platner’s campaign would have withered instantly after revelations that he once had a Totenkopf SS tattoo, previously identified himself as a communist, said Black people were poor tippers, and wrote that white people “actually are” as racist and stupid as Trump thinks they are.

Instead, after all this surfaced, Platner actually rose in the polls. Considering the circumstances, there are several reasonable explanations for this.

Maybe Maine Dems have concluded that moral purity tests are politically suicidal after years of watching heterodox figures like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk drift away from the party.

Maybe Platner’s rough-edged outsider persona simply feels more authentic than another interchangeable politician in a pantsuit droning on about “working families.”

Perhaps the difference is that, unlike Trump or Texas’ scandal-plagued Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, Platner has at least attempted contrition.

Or maybe Maine Democrats have absorbed the same lesson Republicans adopted in 2016: Once voters stop treating scandal as disqualifying, policing your own side for off-the-field behavior starts to look like unilateral disarmament.

I mean, who could blame them for thinking you’ve got to fight fire with fire? America, after all, reelected Trump after 34 felony convictions.

At a certain point, continuing to insist that “character matters” starts sounding like advice Ward Cleaver might have offered Wally on “Leave It to Beaver.”

But Maine isn’t the only example of voters viewing scandalous behavior as a “keeping it real” feature, not a bug.

Another just took place in Texas, when the aforementioned Paxton crushed normie incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a Republican primary runoff, garnering nearly 64% of the vote.

Paxton, it’s worth noting, was previously indicted on felony securities fraud charges, impeached by the Texas House on allegations including bribery, accused by senior aides of abusing his office to help a donor and real-estate developer and accused by his wife (a Texas Republican politician) of infidelity, just to name a few of his greatest hits.

Yet, not only did the scandals not doom Paxton, they probably helped him. They signaled a willingness to fight, casting him as both a victim and an outsider. There may be no purer expression of trickle-down Trumpism than Paxton, which probably explains why Trump endorsed him.

At this point, you might be thinking that all is lost. But there are counterexamples that lend to optimism.

Paxton’s Democratic opponent in Texas, for example, offers a stark contrast, as well as an opportunity to test the level of our societal decline in November.

Texas Democrats could easily have nominated their own chaos agent in Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a progressive firebrand whose flair for viral combat suggests she understands the incentives of modern politics perfectly well.

Instead, they chose James Talarico — a young state legislator, former middle-school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian — who projects the kind of earnest optimism that lands somewhere between Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg.

If a Democrat like Talarico can win in deep-red Texas — against a scandal-plagued candidate who shouldn’t get within 10 miles of the U.S. Capitol — it will perhaps provide a modicum of hope that red lines still exist, and that some voters still believe character is destiny.

But regardless of who wins that matchup, the fact that both Paxton in Texas and Platner in Maine emerged as their party’s respective Senate candidates (Platner won’t technically be the Democratic nominee until after the Maine primary in June) still suggests something profound has shifted in American politics.

Not long ago, the scandals attached to either man would have ended a campaign overnight.

Today, they function more like résumé enhancements. Because the defining lesson of the Trump era may be this: Nothing is disqualifying anymore.

If a failed nepo baby and middling reality-TV star can become president, survive endless scandals (think “Access Hollywood”), rack up felony convictions, be found liable for sexual abuse, sit by and watch a Capitol riot, and then return to power anyway, traditional ideas about character and electability are simply no longer relevant.

The question now is whether Trumpism has become America’s permanent political operating system — or whether the new rules apply only to Trump himself.

November will offer some hints.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

Americans always say they want politicians with backbone — men and women of principle who will stand up for what they believe in, even when it’s unpopular.

And every so often, the American people prove their commitment to this noble aspiration by firing anybody who actually tries it.

Take Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who just lost a reelection bid by double digits after President Trump’s affiliated committees dumped enough money into Kentucky to purchase, well, Kentucky.

Massie committed the cardinal sin of modern Republican politics: He behaved as though Congress were a coequal branch of government instead of the warm-up act before a Trump rally.

He bucked Trump on spending, Iran and — in what apparently qualified as political suicide — whether or not to release the Epstein files. For this display of independent thought, Massie was summarily retired by what can only be described as the Trump cult (formerly known as the Republican primary electorate).

Before anybody accuses me of hyperbole, consider the remarkably revealing example presented recently on the New York Times podcast, “The Daily.”

At a town hall in Burlington, Ky., one voter explained to Massie that Trump is basically omniscient.

“As I see it,” the voter said, “the one person in the whole United States, maybe the world, that understands everything and has input to everything is Donald Trump.”

Not content with mere earthly wisdom, Trump also possesses universal awareness, superior intelligence and perhaps even low-level clairvoyance. The voter continued that Trump “gets more information, more meetings, more everything” than anybody else in government.

When Massie noted that Trump opposed releasing the Epstein files, the man calmly explained that if Trump changed positions, “there was a reason” — one too profound for ordinary mortals to comprehend.

Massie’s reply deserves to be bronzed and mounted over the entrance to the U.S. Capitol: “I don’t give anybody but God that kind of trust.”

Unfortunately, for a large portion of the Republican electorate (about 55%, based on the Kentucky primary results), those words constitute sacrilege against their earthly savior.

As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham cheerfully boasted on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “This is the party of Donald Trump.” Which is true in much the same way North Korea is the party of Kim Jong Un.

The one ironic twist in all of this is that Americans finally managed to punish somebody over the Epstein files — only it turned out to be the guy who wanted them released.

There’s American justice for you.

Massie isn’t the only Republican currently being fitted for concrete shoes. Trump also helped finish off Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, whose unforgivable crime was voting to convict Trump during the impeachment trial following Jan. 6. And Trump has endorsed controversial Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, which in today’s GOP primary environment is roughly the equivalent of finding a horse head in your bed.

Now, to be fair, Cassidy and Cornyn are no Massie, who openly opposed Trump and paid the price standing upright. Cassidy and Cornyn demonstrated brief moments of independence, only to spend years vainly performing political interpretive dance routines in hopes of regaining Trump’s favor.

Still, there may be a silver lining here for students of political irony.

Trump’s endorsement of Paxton will force Republicans to spend enormous sums defending a deep red state that would ordinarily require little more than a campaign sign and a pickup truck.

Meanwhile, Trump is creating resentful lame-duck Republicans in Congress who now possess the most dangerous attribute in politics: nothing left to lose.

But the broader message is unmistakable. Trump wants Republicans to understand that disagreement will not be tolerated. No criticism. No distancing. No independent branding.

The party line is whatever Trump said five minutes ago, amended by whatever he says five minutes from now. By now, everyone knows this to be true.

Which would be excellent news for Trump, if not for one small complication: The rest of the country appears to be tiring of his act. Recent polling shows Trump’s approval slipping to 37%, while Democrats gain major ground, surging to a +11 on the generic congressional ballot.

Trump, it seems, has created a situation in which Republicans can either oppose him and be destroyed in a primary, or they can embrace him and risk losing the House and the Senate in November’s general election. It’s the old “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” conundrum.

The point is this: With the midterms approaching, Trump is making sure Republicans are ensnared in the gravitational pull of his unpopularity.

That may satisfy the president’s desire for complete loyalty. It may also hand Democrats control of both chambers of Congress.

Trump is settling all family business this week, by purging those pesky disloyal Republicans. Only time will tell whether he’s also purging America’s non-Republican “swing” voters, as well.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

Nearly three months after the United States and Israel launched their large-scale bombing campaign against Iran and about six weeks since the April 8 ceasefire took effect, President Trump faces an inflection point. Does he return to war? Maintain the ceasefire and U.S. blockade on Iranian ports in the hope of cutting a deal on American terms? Or drop his maximalist negotiating stance?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), an informal foreign policy advisor for the White House, continues to press for more aggressive U.S. military action. Trump’s political advisors would prefer that the war end as soon as possible to minimize political repercussions against the Republican Party in a midterm election year.

Trump seems conflicted. Despite weeks of U.S. bombardment and an ongoing naval blockade, Tehran is as protective of its nuclear program today as it was before the war began. “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social over the weekend. A day later, Trump took to the social media platform again to announce he suspended planned U.S. attacks on Iran to give talks more time.

Unfortunately for Trump, he’s proved to be his own worst enemy on this subject. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and Tehran’s effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, the regime’s two biggest cards, are a byproduct of Trump’s own policy decisions.

The first is a clear indictment of Trump’s first-term order to withdraw the United States from the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a highly technical accord that put Iran’s nuclear work in a box by restricting the number and quality of centrifuges it could use, capped the amount of enriched uranium it could produce and compelled Tehran to ship 97% of its stockpile out of the country. When the Trump administration scrapped that hard-won deal, Iran responded by enriching more nuclear material at a faster pace and accumulating the very stockpile the Trump administration is now seeking to neutralize.

The Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s second card, would not even be an issue today if the Trump administration had refrained from going to war in the first place. On Feb. 27, the day before the conflict began, more than 150 tankers and vessels traveled through the strait. The international waterway was open for business.

Not so today. On Thursday, a grand total of three crossings were registered in the waterway. This collapse of commerce is a consequence of Iran’s ability to harass civilian tankers so much that shipping companies no longer view the journey as worth the cost. As Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday: “The Iranian capability to stop commerce has been dramatically depleted through the strait, but their voice is very loud. And those threats are clearly heard by the merchant industry and insurance industry.”

By virtue of his own actions, Trump is now left with a series of policy options that range from least bad to terrible. None of them are ideal, and all of them carry some risk.

For starters, Trump could resume the war. Any renewed U.S. bombing campaign would probably expand the U.S. military’s original set of targets to include a portion of Iran’s energy infrastructure, which Trump has threatened repeatedly to hit. A U.S. invasion of Kharg Island, where 90% of Iran’s oil processing takes place, might also be up for discussion. The aim would be to destroy Iran’s remaining military capabilities and further squeeze its oil revenue until Tehran’s strategic calculus on the war shifts to Washington’s liking.

Yet there are no guarantees that doubling down on military force will work. Trump’s entire strategy has relied on a baseline assumption: The more punitive the United States is, the more likely Tehran will be to cave. Yet that simply hasn’t occurred. If anything, Iran is more dug in now than it was in the opening days of the conflict. For the regime, capitulating to Trump is as dangerous as losing the war. Why would more bombing succeed where previous bombing failed?

The risks of additional U.S. military action are considerable as well. Before the ceasefire, Iran was launching ballistic missiles and attack drones across multiple gulf Arab states, hitting Qatar’s largest natural gas processing facility, Saudi Arabia’s east-west oil pipeline and Dubai’s luxurious high-rises. As the Iranians have stated, such attacks will not only resume if Trump orders a resumption of the war but will expand to new targets, including desalination facilities and nuclear power plants. Such strikes would raise global oil and gas prices to even more absurd levels, adding to the extra $40 billion the American people are already paying for fuel since the war began.

What about continuing the status quo? While this contingency would be less costly than another round of bombing or a U.S. ground invasion, it’s unclear whether it would help or hurt negotiations toward a settlement. There’s a possibility that extending the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports could merely reaffirm the regime’s earlier decision to preserve its own shutdown of the strait. Iran is now urging Washington to end its blockade before talks on the nuclear file can be held. And it’s a mystery whether Trump’s blockade is working anyway; the U.S. intelligence community assesses that Iran could withstand this pressure point for three to four more months, which may be too long for Trump to sustain given the oil disruptions that are bound to get worse.

Striking an agreement to end the war, return the strait to open traffic and restrict Iran’s nuclear program would be the most beneficial policy for the United States with the least amount of cost attached — not quite undoing the harm from Trump’s first-term decision to scrap the nuclear deal and his second-term decision to start a war. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are passing proposals back and forth as we speak. But as of now, Trump can’t stomach agreeing to a deal that covers some of Iran’s terms, including but not limited to a shorter suspension of enriched uranium and some kind of Iranian role in the management of the strait. Even if Trump did reassess his position, he would be forced to confront the hawks in his political coalition who would consider anything short of Iran’s total surrender a failure.

In short, Trump is in an unenviable position. He’s got nobody to blame but himself.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist.

With President Trump continuing to tank in the polls, the parlor game we know as “2028 Republican primary speculation” is back in full swing among the chattering classes.

Vice President JD Vance — who would normally be considered the heir apparent, and who just happened to make a campaign stop in Iowa recently — now finds his “America First” brand positioning complicated by Trump’s Iran misadventure. So much for an easy glide path to the nomination.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio would seem to benefit from Vance’s stumbles, but in a political moment that fetishizes “authenticity,” Rubio risks coming across like a man who irons his blue jeans. Add to that his reputation as a foreign policy hawk in a party that increasingly wants out of “forever wars,” and he’d be the ideal presidential candidate for … 2004.

All of which has opened the door to more imaginative speculation. “If Pat Buchanan and Roger Ailes had a baby,” former “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd recently quipped, “it would be Tucker Carlson.”

Ailes, of course, was the media-savvy evil genius who took Fox News to No. 1. And while “Pitchfork Pat’s” populist presidential campaigns weren’t ultimately victorious, he is credited with paving the way for Trump’s eventual 2016 victory.

As this comparison suggests, Carlson could make a formidable Republican presidential candidate. The hitch? Carlson and Trump have recently been trading blows, which is not where any potential Republican candidate wants to be.

For all of his polling woes, Trump still enjoys an 85% approval rating among Republicans, according to the recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. And his recent defeat of Indiana Republican legislators who dared defy him over gerrymandering only underscores the point: Trump’s grip on the Republican Party remains firm.

Even if you dismiss talk of a third Trump term as overwrought constitutional fan fiction, it’s hard to imagine a Republican nominee emerging without Trump’s blessing — let alone in defiance of it.

Which brings us to the latest theory making the rounds: Trump isn’t going to pass this torch to anyone lacking the proper surname.

In this telling, Vance is the loyal, if naive, assistant manager waiting for the boss to retire and hand him the keys to the office — only to discover it’s a family business and the ne’er-do-well son has just pulled into the parking lot in a Ferrari.

Enter Donald Trump Jr., whose chief qualification is name recognition so strong it could probably win a Republican primary on its own.

Add to that daddy’s endorsement, and as the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last has noted about Vance and Rubio, “Challenging Don Jr. would turn them into enemies of the people.”

But that doesn’t mean this is a slam dunk for Junior.

As British-American journalist Sarah Baxter recently wrote, “like Logan Roy, the patriarch in the television drama Succession, Trump loves playing his children off against each other. He thinks it instills a healthy killer instinct in his privileged offspring.”

This is to say that Junior isn’t the only potential heir lurking in the wings.

Last year, for example, Eric Trump told a journalist: “I think I could do it. And by the way, I think other members of our family could do it too.”

Which brings us to the wildest speculation of all: Ivanka Trump.

Now, to be sure, Ivanka has kept a polite distance from politics (and her father) in recent years, and she doesn’t exactly electrify the MAGA faithful. But she was always her father’s favorite, and her aforementioned liabilities could be overcome with a sufficiently enthusiastic paternal endorsement.

And once she became the standard bearer, Ivanka could market herself as both continuity and “change” — a neat trick, if she can pull it off.

In that sense Republicans could keep the Trump brand while offering a kinder, gentler, fresher face — all while making GOP history with a female presidential nominee.

This, of course, raises the question: Why would Ivanka — or any of the Trumps — want to be part of a political dynasty?

Among the many reasons, the Trump family is raking in cash. Lots of it. And as long as the next president could conceivably be a family member — a possibility that remains operable even if a Trump family member were to lose the general election in 2028 — the spigot will remain on.

That’s one of the reasons that, although Vance would normally be Trump’s obvious successor, the smart money might actually be to bet on someone with the last name “Trump.”

Now, if this dynastic denouement sounds far-fetched, of course it is. But so was electing a thrice-married casino magnate to the presidency in 2016. And so reelecting him in 2024.

We’re living in an era when the seemingly improbable isn’t just possible — it might even be likely.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

Democrats have a huge opportunity to make a huge difference. But whether they’ll grab it is a huge question.

In 2020, I wrote that voters were “weary, anxious and looking for salve” after President Trump’s first term. I said then that the experienced, reassuring Joe Biden fit the moment. Now I fear that if Democrats nominate a similar presidential candidate in 2028, one who wins yet doesn’t act with alacrity on democracy preservation and helping Americans live better lives, a fed-up electorate will once again turn them out as ineffectual.

Who can or should lead the party at a time like this?

I’m not alone in hoping for a tough and confrontational 2028 nominee, someone who is aggressive, persistent and, when necessary, as ruthless as the forces on the opposite side. This person also must have the energy to undertake the mammoth task of repairing the institutional wreckage of Trumpism. Which suggests Democrats should be checking out younger nominees.

Fortunately, newer generations of leaders are emerging. Those who “get it,” in my view, include Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

Obviously any Democrat will be better than anyone from Trump’s team or orbit, including JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. or Marco Rubio. The issue facing Democrats is whether moderate or policy wonkish people such as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear or Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro would be the democracy warriors this moment demands. Repairing a crucial interstate bridge with lightning speed is a great thing and, sometimes, so is outreach to Republicans and Fox News. But would they prioritize thinking big and fighting hard for the fundamental changes we need?

Where would centrist former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, the new Virginia governor, land on this scale? Even after coming around to supporting new House maps that will net four seats for her party? Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who began his podcast by inviting MAGA guests, championed a referendum on five new Democratic seats in his state and led his party to a redistricting triumph. Where would he land? Would he prioritize outreach to Republicans or the battle to assure a “no kings” future for America? The need for structural changes in our outdated institutions is glaringly obvious. Who will run to repair this country? Who can be trusted to follow through? Because the solutions are out there, staring us in the face:

Checks on presidential pardon power. A larger, term-limited Supreme Court bound to an enforceable ethics code. A national law requiring independent redistricting commissions or, better yet, multi-member districts with proportional representation. A voting rights law that sets minimum standards for mail voting, early voting and voter IDs. Anti-corruption laws that prevent profiteering by presidents and their allies. Explicit limits on presidential construction and alterations to federal properties. A stronger “impoundment” act with sharp teeth to make sure future presidents spend taxpayer money constitutionally, as Congress intends, instead of any way they want. D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood to start rebalancing a Congress and electoral college that have shortchanged urban America since the late 19th century.

It’s a long list, and there’s no guarantee that today’s Supreme Court would allow any of it. But realizing some of these goals will take decades; we can’t be discouraged by temporary impediments such as the current lineup of justices. The work on all of it should start ASAP — next year in the next Congress if Democrats are running one or both chambers. And at some point, we’ll have a different high court.

I can already hear the protests: What about affordability? That’s the best part: Trump has done so many things to make life more expensive that simply reversing them would have immediate impact. Stop the Iran war; reopen the Strait of Hormuz; aim to restore the Obama-era agreement that kept Iran’s nuclear ambitions in check; end the Trump tariffs; stop shrinking labor forces in agriculture, healthcare, construction and other industries by ending detentions and deportations of noncriminals; reverse last year’s tax breaks for elites and restore the money for Medicaid and health insurance premium subsidies; and kill off the Versailles-level Trump ballroom that he now wants to fund with taxpayer dollars (initially $400 million, now $1 billion).

Then Democrats could revisit some of their own affordability priorities, including the expanded child tax credit that significantly reduced child poverty, new ways to put housing within reach of more people and national paid family leave. They could also crack down on military spending that is pointless in the modern era and refocus on cheap and effective equipment such as drones like Ukraine is using to strike inside Russia.

As it happens, a stark indicator of the political tides came as I was writing this. Maine Gov. Janet Mills suddenly dropped out of the Democratic Senate primary race against Graham Platner. It was a lightning bolt, given her establishment support after being recruited by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But in a way it was inevitable.

Mills is 78. If she had gone on to win the primary and defeat GOP Sen. Susan Collins, she would have been sworn in at age 79. Platner is 41, an oyster farmer and military veteran with a compelling, relatable persona. Though he has a controversial past, Mills’ negative ads did nothing to dent his appeal. Polls showed him winning the primary vote against Mills, sometimes by 2 to 1, and with a consistent general-election edge against Collins as well.

Platner told Jon Stewart last week that the party leadership establishment had largely ignored him. His message to them? “You should be curious, because I’m polling 40 points ahead.” By the next morning, Mills was out, and the establishment — Schumer and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the Senate campaign committee — said they’d work with Platner to flip the seat.

The midterm races are sending Democrats clues. They should take them seriously.

Jill Lawrence is a journalist and the author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” Bluesky: @jilldlawrence

In June 2017, with President Trump newly installed in office for the first time, one of the biggest battles with the administration was about oil. He’d just named the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, as his secretary of State, even though great reporting — in this newspaper among others — had recently shown that the company knew all about, and lied all about, climate change as far back as the 1980s.

Back east, the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts were trying to take the oil giant on, initiating investigations of the company to try to hold it accountable. Environmental advocates and consumer groups were pressing hard for California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to join in, and she seemed to be considering it. Then she left the office to assume her new U.S. Senate seat, and the decision fell to her replacement, Xavier Becerra — now a leading candidate for California governor.

As I wrote in these pages at the time, it was a great test for him, and a great curiosity that he was staying silent, “since the rest of Sacramento is hard at work dealing with climate change.” I was not the only one who noticed. Seventy thousand Californians signed petitions demanding action. Eight California representatives in Congress — including Jared Huffman and Ted Lieu — sent him a letter demanding a “vigorous” inquiry and pointing out that it was particularly important because the newly elected Trump administration was clearly favoring the oil industry. “California has led the world in responding to the dangers of climate change, and we know that it will continue to do so,” they wrote. “You now have a leading role in that effort.” But ultimately Becerra did not have a leading role, or indeed any role at all: He punted, as this editorial page pointed out. What Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is now trying to do by statute — immunize the big oil companies from prosecution for climate liability — Becerra accomplished by sheer silence.

In the years since, of course, California has paid a huge price for our inaction on climate. Just looking at wildfire, there were of course the great blazes that Los Angeles County will never forget in 2025, but also the 2020 August Complex fire in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, the 2021 Dixie fire up north, the 2017 conflagration across Napa and Sonoma counties, the 2017 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the 2018 Camp fire that devastated Paradise — the list goes sadly on and on and on.

Meanwhile, Big Oil and its friends at Big Utility have racked up huge profits, and Californians have faced ever higher bills. An unhobbled oil industry played a huge role in reelecting Trump in 2024 and in taking us to war with Iran.

And through it all, during his years as attorney general, Becerra did little or nothing to help. As I said all those years ago, it’s a mystery why, though I fear the mystery gets clearer with each campaign funding filing over his long career. As California’s top prosecutor, he took big donations from oil industry giants such as Chevron, and also from energy companies Sempra and Southern California Edison. As a member of Congress, he took larger checks from Pacific Gas and Electric and Edison International.

This time around, as he seeks the governor’s office, Chevron has maxed out its contributions to his campaign, the first time they’ve found a gubernatorial candidate to back in a decade. Meanwhile, across the country, leading progressives have signed a pledge refusing fossil fuel donations. Another gubernatorial contender, Katie Porter, is among them. Needless to say, Becerra is not.

The California chapters of Third Act — a group of Americans over 60 that I helped found — canvassed their members last month and issued an endorsement of Tom Steyer, on the grounds that he had worked hard over the years to address energy and climate issues. Instead of taking money from Big Oil, he’s given money, time and counsel to those of us volunteering in the fight against the industry. In fact, I think that whether one is most concerned about lowering utility bills with clean energy or protecting California’s forests, beaches and insurance rates from the global warming threat, he’d be the most climate-conscious elected official in America.

But Third Act was also founded to help protect our democracy. And that means disconnecting public policy from campaign donations. We need leaders who will do the right thing for us, not for their donors. Steyer has called on Becerra to return his donations from Big Oil. That would be a start, but it doesn’t really make up for the wasted decade we’ll never get back.

Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act and the author, most recently, of “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate, a Fresh Chance for Our Civilization.”