Will U.S democracy die from embarrassment? | Will Bunch Newsletter

If the summer of 2026 came with an Official Cliché™, it would have to be “glass half empty, half full.” Things could be better. Things could be worse. It’s people — many of whom are quite wonderful — doing our best in a world run by institutions that are rotten to the core. You’ll find no greater example than the World Cup that wrapped up Sunday with a well-deserved trophy for Spain. Will we remember the gross commercialism and rank corruption perpetuated by FIFA and its political twin, Donald Trump? Or the many remarkable moments on the pitch, and the joyous sense of internationalism in the stands and beyond? How do we get to a place where elite greed is crushed while mere mortals like us thrive?

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

If you live in or near a big city and use mass transit to get around, you know this experience. You hop on a subway or a bus, focused only on getting from Point A to Point B, but there’s a man just a few feet away who demands your attention. He is talking loudly, repeating the same gibberish phrase over and over, seemingly arguing with someone until you realize he’s not even holding a phone. It’s just him. You feel a mix of emotions — sorry for the guy because clearly he’s going through something, yet mainly praying that he will just stop yelling and give you some peace.

On Thursday night, that clearly disturbed man was Donald J. Trump, billionaire, who’s owned a mansion and a yacht and is currently the 47th president of the United States. And all of America was his subway car, just dying to get off.

Trump commandeered 26 minutes of invaluable TV prime time (CBS and MS Now ran all or most of it; NBC, ABC and even CNN declined) for a speech that arguably may be remembered as one of the most consequential ever delivered from the White House — but only for the Big Lie constructed on a foundation of half-truths.

Despite days of hype, which was sensibly ignored by most folks who know better after a decade of Trump’s political dishonesty, there was zero new evidence that China or any other foreign power consequentially interfered in the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost fairly and squarely to Joe Biden. POTUS instead offered gross exaggerations around old reports that would have made the late red-baiter Joe McCarthy blush, with bizarre allegations about the CIA and other intel agencies while he was in charge of them in 2020.

But this wasn’t debate club, and making a coherent case was never the point. Trump was seeking to offer a ball of confusion that he can use today to pressure his slim GOP majorities on Capitol Hill to pass legislation that experts say would threaten to disqualify millions of legitimate voters, or that he could use tomorrow to try and seize emergency federal powers over the election.

There was a huge problem, however, with the president’s scare tactics: No one was scared. It’s not just that many among the 61% or so of Americans who disapprove of Trump’s job performance had expected the Thursday night monologue would include even worse lies or fabrications, or stronger threats — instead of a leader who was not just incoherent but weak.

But even the Republican politicians and right-wing opinion makers who were a main target of the White House address looked the other way in the immediate aftermath. We were all the mortified passengers on the same subway car, hoping the noise would just end.

Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump’s longtime friend, was on the air when the speech ended and fairly quickly changed the topic, so eager to avoid the stench. Even worse, the president’s favorite show, Fox & Friends, which aired early the next morning, did not mention the address once in the three hours it was on.

I’ve lived through the 1980 men’s hockey gold medal and Watergate, the Iraq War and the legalization of gay marriage — so I know how it feels to be proud to be an American, and to be furious with our government. But I’ve never felt the sense of utter embarrassment that was the national mood at 9:30 p.m. last Thursday. The president gave a prime-time address that was complete fiction. Who will ever again take the United States seriously on a world stage?

But there was also a dangerous flip side to America’s week of magical thinking. In delivering a speech about election integrity problems that don’t exist, there was also a pack of wild dogs that did not bark Thursday night. For one thing, Trump barely mentioned his unilateral decision to resume and escalate the war in Iran, even as three more U.S. troops would be dead by week’s end and everyday Americans once again felt the pain of gas prices over $4 a gallon.

But Trump and his GOP allies were determined to ignore, deflect, or flat-out lie about the crisis that was literally right in their faces: the smoke from northern wildfires, mostly in rural, remote Canada, that shrouded huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast in thick, wood-smelling smoke and led to orders for people to remain indoors.

Wildfires may be as old as the trees, but there’s only one reason why smoke from Canada has caused two major health emergencies in the United States since 2023, and that reason is climate change. Consistently warmer summers — even more extreme in northern Canada than elsewhere — have led to drought conditions that fuel these blazes. “The best way to solve it is to just stop burning fossil fuels,“ Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean at the University of Michigan, told the CBC.

Except that claiming that human-made climate change is a hoax is Trump’s second Big Lie, coming in right behind the “stolen” 2020 election that wasn’t actually stolen. His regime has spent the last 18 months tilting at windmills and solar panels and throwing the awesome power of the federal government fully behind burning as much coal, natural gas and oil as possible, even as the nation’s crude oil stockpile hits a 43-year low.

But suffocating smoke from the northlands is a jolly big problem, which nobody can deny. And so a president who’s been utterly skewered by South Park decided to rap: “Blame Canada.” The world’s climate-denier-in-chief was shocked, shocked that “the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”

Filmmaker Jim Pattiz called this — wait for it — America’s “latest global embarrassment.” He wrote: “The whole planet is watching an American president shake his fist at the sky and order a sovereign country to get its clouds under control.”

There’s two ways to look at all of this. For now, Trump’s lame efforts to frame the looming midterm election as rigged is coming off as sad and pathetic, a lot more Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator than an actual führer. He lacks both evidence and judges who will rule in his favor, while his political base is shrinking every day.

But the fact that Trump was willing to debase himself and the American presidency with a joke speech on national TV also reveals the president’s desperation to avoid an election loss by any means necessary. Trump’s scheme hinges on purging the top ranks of the military, while hiring thousands of newly hired, masked immigration goons to do the dirty work. Did I mention the nuclear weapons? We turn a blind eye to the man in the subway car at our own peril.

For now, Trump will not be ignored, like Glenn Close flipping the lamp switch on and off in Fatal Attraction. Neither the mortification of Thursday’s speech nor the death of three soldiers in his Iran war-of-choice could keep the president from bullying his way onto the main stage at Sunday’s World Cup final in New Jersey, ignoring the boos to shoehorn his way into Spain’s victory photos as if he had assisted on the winning goal.

Can a world superpower die from embarrassment? We are finding out in real time.

Question: Why is [Trump] being allowed to randomly declare tariffs on Canada again if the Supreme Court said that it was illegal? Do we have to have the same argument over and over again? — Stephanie King (@stephstephking.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Apparently we do. Section 338 of the 1930 Trade Act — known, notoriously, to history geeks as the Smoot-Hawley Act that only exacerbated the Great Depression — gives the president fairly broad powers to impose retaliatory tariffs if his administration concludes that a foreign country is discriminating against U.S. products. Thanks to the international trade war that Trump himself initiated, the president is now claiming that Canada is punishing American autos, alcohol, and dairy products. It feels like the proposed 50% levy on many Canadian products is less about sound economics and more a) answering GOP calls to blame Canada for the wildfires that are actually the result of climate change, and b) trying to change the subject from a disastrous week. They don’t take effect for 30 days, plenty of time for the next TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) Tuesday.

Last week’s question about how to respond to Trump’s Big Lie about election fraud that we all knew was coming in Thursday’s speech was probably, in hindsight, too wonky to generate much response. Those who did write agreed that a heavy burden falls on the news media to do everything to debunk — or, as longtime reader Rosalind Holtzman put it, “pre-bunk” — the president’s many falsehoods. She added: “Americans have the attention span of mayflies and need review and repetition. Revisit the events of the 2020 elections and how Trump’s claims all failed in court.” I couldn’t agree more.

📮 This week’s question: Optimists are already starting to ponder a world where Donald Trump is no longer president. But where would a Democratic successor even start to undo the damage caused by the many destructive policies of the Trump regime? What should be the Day One measures to start rebuilding U.S. democracy? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Dems Day One agenda” in the subject line.

Before last week, most Americans had never heard of Taylor Farms, a California-based produce firm, and — for a company that supplies lettuce to large U.S. restaurant chains — anonymity was arguably good for business. There are no two words in the English language that can raise awareness of a brand — and destroy it — faster than “explosive diarrhea.” That’s the most alarming symptom from a food-borne illness linked to the parasite cyclospora that’s laid low thousands of Americans in multiple states. Since the early days of the outbreak, suspicion has focused on Taylor Farms after Taco Bell stores stopped using the iceberg lettuce it procures from the company. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) probe into the cause has so far been a mess — much of that the result of steep cuts to food safety by the Trump regime. But there are also ethical concerns.

Follow the money.

Regular folks might not have heard of Taylor Farms, but the world’s largest salad processor has made itself known in the corridors of the Trump regime since March 2025. That was right around the time that the FDA surprised industry observers by postponing its Food Traceability Rule — drafted under the Joe Biden administration to better track and remove contaminated products — for 30 months. Just six days after the industry-friendly move, Trump’s main political action committee, MAGA Inc., received a whopping $1 million donation from Taylor Farms.

What’s more, money buys access in Trump World. The Daily Beast has reported that last Thursday — despite the company’s nationwide lettuce recall — Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials and complained about the way that government has been investigating the outbreak. That meeting was followed by a bizarre weekend in which the FDA initially announced that testing of Taylor Farms produce from central Mexico had tested positive for cyclospora, then told the company one day later the result had been a “false positive.” The chaos means ongoing confusion about why so many Americans are getting sick, and whether it’s safe to eat lettuce. And that raises troubling questions about whether political cash has compromised food safety.

This was hardly the first time that donations to Trump’s massive empire of political wealth — money raised for a man who is constitutionally barred from running for the presidency again — have overlapped with key policy decisions. For example, the New York Times reported this spring that tobacco company Reynolds American donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. just one week before an industry-friendly FDA ruling on e-cigarettes.

MAGA Inc. — just one of several ways that billionaires and corporations can funnel money to Trump World, along with projects like his presidential library — had more than $400 million in the bank at the end of June, an astronomical sum. Its donors have included not only a Who’s Who of American industry but also crypto dudes — whose industry has been largely deregulated under Trump — and wealthy pardon seekers. Some of those dollars will go to GOP candidates in November’s midterms, but what happens to most of this cash is a mystery. Trump may be leaving office on Jan. 20, 2029, but we’ll still be following the money for years to come.

Trump’s second term has been so dangerous for democracy that we tend to forget the horrors of his first four years in the White House. On this date seven years ago, I joined a lot of other folks in shock and dismay over the raw racism of the 45th president’s campaign-style rally in South Carolina, where a diatribe against Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who became a U.S. citizen and represents a Minnesota district, sparked a frenzied chant: “Send her back!” I wrote about the tween girl in the crowd directly behind Trump, who looked around and joined the adults. “In front of national TV cameras, with the 45th president of the United States as maestro, we are witnessing the exact moment that the raging rabble of a Donald Trump rally has taught a child how to hate.” Read the rest: ”I can’t stop thinking about the little girl behind Trump and the hate she’s being taught."

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

Inquirer Opinion Newsletter

Future product

Be the first to hear about a roundup of Inquirer columnists’ perspectives on what’s happening now in our city, our nation, and our world.