After the U.S. resumed bombing Iran yesterday evening, Iranian forces retaliated early this morning with strikes on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.
In Ankara, Türkiye, for a NATO summit, President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”
The U.S. then launched another round of strikes on Iran to “further degrade” its “ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”
As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.
Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.
According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people…. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”
As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.
Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”
What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker agrees. He reposted Trump’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Japan with the comment: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”
Meanwhile, Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that European officials at the NATO summit reacted to Trump’s announcement of new attacks on Iran just a day after he had praised Iranian leaders with the recognition that they can no longer rely on the United States.
A European official told the Politico reporters: “After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese. The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”
A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”
Meanwhile, Steven Rattner of MS NOW noted today that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons have raised about $13 billion in investment capital from foreign governments, mostly in the Middle East, even as Kushner is working for Trump as special envoy to the region..
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
It is the 250th anniversary of St Louis and the city is covered in cakes and police tape.
The cakes are colorful plastic creations placed at local landmarks in early 2014, before officials knew St. Louis’ tourist rush would consist of reporters and activists and militias drawn to mass protests over the police murder of teenager Michael Brown.
St. Louis turned 250 the year the Ferguson uprising gripped the nation. Americans were more innocent back in 2014. We still believed that exposure brought accountability. So we exposed the police, we exposed the system, and we exposed ourselves — to tear gas, to exploitation, to betrayal. We used new technology sold as liberation: the same apps that serve as technofascist tracking tools now.
It’s been a long twelve years.
The 2026 Fourth of July festivities mark my second go-round with a 250th birthday celebration in a violent police state. No one can say I don’t know how to party like an American.
* * *
Vanilla Ice was the last performer to leave Donald Trump’s empty Freedom 250 stage. The concert was canceled, not him: he merely took heed, like a lyrical poet, leaving us but chumps waxed like candles.
The story of America in 2026 is that everyone can get canceled except Donald Trump and Vanilla Ice. If someone told you that in 1990, you’d assume that the Soviets won the Cold War, and maybe they did.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Americans still know “Ice, Ice, Baby”: from Gen Z teens who use it as a theme for Tik-Tok videos of ICE abuses to my generation, who learned from Vanilla Ice that “anything less than the best is a felony.” Trump is less than the best and a felon so he became the president twice.
Will it ever stop? the public cries. Yo, I don’t know, the Democrats say.
That’s been the official Democrat line for a decade. They are supposed to be impeaching Trump, or arresting Trump, or time-traveling to the first term when there was ample opportunity to stop Trump and his mafia cohort, but they are busy holding a party: a uniparty.
Like Vanilla Ice, the uniparty is a one-hit wonder that plays the same track for decades. One set of donors, two sides of a counterfeit coin, and interlocking roles as GOP abuser and Dem enabler. When policies beneficial to the American people are on the verge of being passed, a “rotating villain” appears to annihilate public hope.
Congress does this dance of fake public service as well as I do the “Ice, Ice, Baby” routine I learned in seventh-grade gym: a shuffle by people way too old to be doing it, but who can still perform on command.
Who is the audience? That’s the 21st century question. It’s not the American public, who hold both parties in seething low regard and whose fate is decreed by unelected courts. Over the last decade, we lost civil rights, voting rights, and the right to free assembly. Members of Congress narrate our lost rights like passive spectators.
They are not working for us and that’s nothing new. The new part is the unified willingness to sell out our country to a foreign state — and not bother to hide it.
* * *
The most galling aspect of Trump’s 250th anniversary of America is not the nazi-chintz decor or half-assed state fair. We have come to expect shock value and the desecration of US culture from this regime. Why would they honor a country they are selling for parts? Why please a people whom they see as, at best, pawns in a mass delusion, and, at worst, obstacles to be removed by force?
Their real offense is the celebration of independence that we no longer have. For on the 250th anniversary of its freedom, the US government has surrendered its sovereignty.
The new owners of the US are transnational actors. Their goal is not to rule, but to mine. Technofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk shape the course of American life more than elected officials. Plutocrats with multiple passports and offshore accounts suck the marrow from a skeletal US economy. The biggest new industry is AI, a project aimed at destroying American land to build a facsimile of American life.
Trump gets blamed, but he’s an inflatable tube dude at a mafia chop shop. His apathy to governance is mistaken for sway. Governing was never the point. Trump’s casual treason has always made him an ideal vessel for America’s going-out-of-business sale.
The buyers are foreign and domestic, but one looms above all. One that demands from Americans both taxation and representation — for their wars, their genocide, their demands that US laws on speech and assembly be shaped around their desires, US independence be damned.
The uniparty’s fealty lies with Israel.
For over a decade, top US officials have declared their allegiance to Israel with a fear and ferocity that far outweighs their concern for American life. AIPAC funds US candidates — including seditionists — to the point that US representatives no longer serve their districts, but a foreign country. Unlike every other foreign lobbying group, AIPAC is not required to register under FARA, despite a history of espionage.
The few representatives that oppose funding Israel — whether a right-wing libertarian like Thomas Massie or a left-wing Ferguson activist like Cori Bush — are ousted through smear campaigns and massive donations to candidates selected for their obedience to the lobby. American civilians who criticize Israel’s wars risk losing their jobs, particularly if they work in education, media, or law. Jewish-Americans who criticize the Israeli government are deemed traitors: to Israel.
America has never been a free country, but not since 1775 has it been less of a sovereign one.
* * *
Americans of all backgrounds despise this betrayal. Approval for Israel has plunged since the live-streamed massacre of Palestinians — including tens of thousands of children — followed by Israel pulling a semi-reluctant US into a losing war with Iran.
Awareness of IDF brutality has soared since 2014, when smartphones became widely available and Palestinian documentation transformed worldwide perception of Israeli rule. Netanyahu sneeringly dismissed murdered Palestinian children as “the telegenically dead” but he realized the internet posed a problem. It told the truth.
The solution: murder the witnesses, muzzle the internet, and control the country in between: The US, home to Silicon Valley, billion-dollar aid packages to Israel, and lonely but powerful backing against war crime investigatory bodies like the ICC.
The Democratic establishment is shocked by recent primary wins by leftist candidates who condemn Israel’s atrocities. This includes the 2025 win of Zohran Mamdani, who then helped Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez achieve victories in New York in 2026; followed by Melat Kiros, a Colorado lawyer who lost her job in 2023 for defending Palestinian rights only to oust a politician who had been in office since 1997, the year Kiros was born.
If elected, which is likely, they will join Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and a handful of other representatives who oppose unconditional aid to Israel yet have not been ousted by the Israeli lobby. Some of the previously ousted, like Missouri’s Cori Bush, are attempting to return to office. What is often framed as a “NYC matter” was always a national cause with heartland representation.
The Democratic establishment is surprised by the increase in enthusiasm, especially among youth, for the 2026 slate over 2024. They shouldn’t be. Voter motivation never came down to “Vote Blue No Matter Who” but “Vote Blue No Matter What”. In 2026, the “what” is a genocide of children and Democratic voters refuse to abide it. Given an alternative who is not a Republican, they will vote for them.
Not defending the murder of children will help a candidate win a US election. It’s also the lowest baseline of morality a human being could have. The GOP and the Democrats value neither prerogative. That they act in lockstep to their own detriment, indifferent to public will but deferential to Israel, shows the loss of US sovereignty.
The leftist winning candidates highlighted other assaults on American freedom — they seek to abolish ICE, for example, as it terrorizes US citizens — while proposing to invest in the well-being of Americans: healthcare, schools, affordable housing. These are not radical acts unless you live in a country with a government that sees serving its own citizens as a radical proposition. The current US government does.
People balk at “America First”, a phrase coopted by fascists a century ago. But putting America first when you are representing America is not only theliteral job, but an act of assurance to Americans facing xenophobic assault. Real “America first” is honoring birthright citizenship, where everyone born in America is considered American: a foundational precept that hangs by a thread thanks to a corrupt Supreme Court.
SCOTUS is one of the worst threats to US freedom. Yet pundits bray that the real threat are young Democratic socialists, many Muslim or Latino, who put America first. They put the needs of fellow Americans before the needs of Israel and its lobby.
Their devotion to the American public should move you, because they grew up in a US that betrayed them, over and over, and they did not give up on it like the officials they ran against did.
* * *
As Americans are told to celebrate 250 years of “No taxation without representation”, the US government is moving toward its most blatant surrender of sovereignty yet: the merger of the US and Israeli militaries.
The United States-Israel FUTURES Act, also known as Section 224 and Section 219, proposes to merge the two armies under the grounds of “network integration” and “data fusion”. US intelligence will become Israeli intelligence: legally, this time. Policy on Israel will not be a matter of choice but a structural feature of joint military programs. Should Israel go to war, the US may be formally bound to go with it: a horrific prospect as Netanyahu vows that Israel’s wars will never end.
The FUTURES Act has spurred widespread disapproval and attempts from a few representatives — including AIPAC target Massie — to shoot it down. It draws horror from US veterans, who know no parallel. “I can’t think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power,” retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore toldThe Intercept.
When Trump wanted to merge US and Russian cybertechnology in 2017, the move was met with disgust by Congress, including Republicans like Marco Rubio, who is now in Trump’s cabinet. It was rightfully seen as a national security threat and rejected. But when Israel wants a more dangerous merger, most of Congress abides.
The uniparty dismisses defenders of US sovereignty as the fringes: leftist Democrats and a few retiring Republicans. They are not the fringes: they are the protectors. They are the only US officials honoring US independence on Independence Day.
The rest are collaborators.
* * *
Before she was ousted by far-right GOP Zionists disguising themselves as a group called “Progressives for Missouri”, my Congresswoman, Cori Bush, honored a friend of mine on the House floor. My friend’s name was Bassem Masri and he was a Ferguson protester. He died in 2018 at age 31.
“As a St. Louis Palestinian, Bassem was ready to resist, to rebel, to rise up with us as we demanded an end to the militarized police occupation of our communities,” Bush said in 2021. “Palestinians know what state violence, militarized policing, and occupation of their communities look like.”
Bush spoke as Israel carried out another massacre of Palestinian civilians. I was touched by her tribute. Famed for his fiery denunciations of police brutality, Bassem was in private a friendly, kind-hearted soul. He knew the violence of the US and Israel and sincerely wanted both to stop. Many Palestinians gave St. Louisans advice on how to treat tear gas and dodge surveillance in 2014. Bassem helped build that bridge.
The uniparty has been trying to stop friendship between Palestinians and Americans, particularly Black Americans, since 2014. But the bond has only deepened as Israel’s war crimes worsen, Trump’s domestic abuses grow, and the Democrats abet both. The US-Israel FUTURES Act is meant to formalize a joint assault on the friendship of free-thinking peoples: one that hostile takeovers of social media failed to eradicate.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” the saying goes. The US is surrendering its great power status. On one hand, we are too criminal to deserve it. On the other, what we are entering into with Israel is far worse.
Sovereignty means a country can try to change. You make your own choices and are responsible for your own sins and, if you’re doing it right, you learn to recognize them as such. Sovereignty is not only what Americans fought for in 1776 but is vital to every civil rights battle that seeks to turn paper principles into practice; and to every anti-war movement demanding an end to this era of unaccountable imperialism.
I’m not lighting fireworks this Fourth of July. I’ll light candles: for Palestine’s slain children, Iran’s slain children, America’s slain children. I’ll light candles for the world no one deserved.
* * *
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Going into the weekend during which Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the day on which the Second Continental Congress accepted the Declaration of Independence, President Donald J. Trump was facing a whole lot of bad news.
There was the war on Iran. On Thursday, after U.S. Central Command said regional leaders in the Middle East were committed to the “free flow of commerce” in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s military command said that any ships trying to cross the strait on unapproved routes would be met with a “forceful response.” The U.S. has been urging ships to use a route close to Oman, but Iran’s warning caused ships to turn around.
Iran was part of the story of the economy. The choking off of the roughly 20% of the world’s oil that flowed through the Strait of Hormuz until Trump launched an attack on Iran has caused inflation to spike in the U.S. On Wednesday, July 1, Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, told the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking that “prices are too high.” With inflation over 4%, Warsh also reiterated that the Fed would continue to hold its goal of no more than 2% inflation, suggesting that the interest rate cuts Trump wants so badly are not going to happen any time soon. Currently there is talk of raising interest rates later this year.
In addition to concerns about stringency in the oil markets, Joe Hernandez of NPR reported on Friday that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz also affected transport of about one third of the world’s fertilizer transported by sea. Shortages hurt farmers around the world, including in the U.S., where farmers were hit with skyrocketing fertilizer prices during planting season. An April survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn’t afford all the fertilizer they needed for the season.
Hernandez reports that higher fertilizer prices are just one of the reasons that consumers will see higher food prices this fall.
And then there were the stories about corruption. On Tuesday, new financial disclosures showed that Trump has made an eye-popping $1.4 billion in his family’s cryptocurrency ventures since he took office. On Thursday, Trump appeared to feel the need to defend those profits, telling CNBC: “There’s nothing illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it I could know.” Julia Manchester of The Hill noted that Trump went on to say that the nature of the presidency means that his children “have inside information” about almost any business decision they make. He said: “Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information.”
There are specific legal prohibitions against using insider information for benefit in stock trades and financial transactions.
And Trump appears to have fleeced his own followers. On Saturday, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times reported that as of the end of June, nearly a million people who bought Trump’s memecoin lost a total of $3.81 billion while Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump took transaction fees up front, so he made money no matter what happened with the coin. For his followers, though, his advice that “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” and to “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” cost them dearly as the coin slid from trading at $75.35 to trading at $1.76, a drop of 97%.
On Thursday, Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources released a report accusing Trump of cheating the American people at large by diverting donations that donors intended to make to the nonpartisan America250 program to his own Freedom 250 organization. After failing to take over America250 entirely, the report charges, Trump’s people created Freedom 250 within the National Park Foundation. By using a known and popular public charity as cover, Freedom 250 could attract donations while operating outside the transparency and accountability rules Congress required for America250.
The report suggests that Trump officials gave donors intending to donate to the bipartisan America250 routing and account numbers for Trump’s Freedom 250. They also took most of the money Congress appropriated for the America 250 project; in June a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic: “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended. This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”
But Trump officials routed that money to favored contractors, including the firm that helped to organize Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before attendees stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told reporters: “I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed. But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Freedom 250 focused on promoting his 250-foot-tall triumphal arch at his Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Recurring problems with Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool marred that celebration as the pool turned green with algae and then pieces of the pool’s new coating began to break loose. Administration officials accused vandals of causing the damage. They put fencing around the pool and had National Guard troops patrol it.
The Great American State Fair opened on June 25 after a number of musical acts backed out, saying they had been misled into thinking the event was backed by the bipartisan America 250. Once open, the fair was plagued with electrical issues, sparse exhibits, and heat. A model of the proposed triumphal arch looked cheap and quickly began to come apart. Visitors were few and far between, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that aerial images of the empty mall so enraged Trump that White House officials deleted them from official and personal social media accounts.
And on June 25, in response to a lawsuit by journalist Katie Phang, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting attorney general Todd Blanche to produce key documents from the Epstein files by July 2 or show cause why the Department of Justice is refusing. On July 2 it refused to produce the material, saying its redactions and omissions were within the scope of the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
On July 3, Fifty Plus One, which tracks Trump’s job approval rating, reported that 59.1% of Americans disapprove of his performance while only 37.5% approve.
And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.
Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.
Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.
Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.
Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.
In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.
Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”
He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”
On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.
Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”
Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.
Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.
When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”
And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
