Something to Know 12 December (part 2)

Meanwhile......Nothing of benefit to the American Taxpayers is happening in Washington D.C.   Pickleball on the subject of health care is still going on, with time running out.  Republicans are beginning to feel something more ominous, than a pinch, that a decision on sticking with Trump or working for their own constituents is best for their political tenure or future.   At this same time, an ailing and desperate (in fear of the Epstein Files release), is throwing every attention grabbing hunk of mung at the walls, and finding that nothing is sticking.  Yes, he is putting sand in the transmission and sugar in the tank, which will make the next administration's work a big mess to flush out.   His delusional rant, which you will read in HCR this today, is intended by him to grab attention .....and he is succeeding, but only to demonstrate that we have one sick maniac at the helm of a drifting ship.   The United States of America has lost its luster, its sense of humanity, and greatness.   Wake up America!

Here's Jimmy....   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rFlJiyfds0

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	Dec 11, 2025, 10:42 PM (10 hours ago)
to me

	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more December 11, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Dec 12   READ IN APP   On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump kicked off his nationwide tour to assure Americans that the Republicans are focused on bringing down costs. Voters turned to Trump in 2024 in large part because he promised that his understanding of the economy would enable him to bring down the prices that had risen in the global inflation spike after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world economy. Within weeks of the election, Trump began to back off on that promise, telling a reporter for Time magazine in December 2024 that "it's very hard" to bring down prices. Then in April he launched a tariff war that began to raise prices, while his on-again, off-again tariff rates discouraged businesses from investing while they waited to see what made economic sense. Americans are not impressed with Trump's handling of the economy. A poll by AP/NORC, which stands for Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago—a very reputable polling collaboration—released today shows that only 31% of American adults approve of Trump's management of the economy, with 67% disapproving. Among Independents, that number breaks down to 15% approving and 80% disapproving. Trump's overall numbers are not much better. Just 36% of American adults approve of his job performance, with 61% disapproving. Among Independents, just 20% approve, while 74% disapprove. With them, he is underwater by an astonishing 54 points. So Trump's advisors have sent him off on a tour to convince Americans the administration shares their concerns about the economy. On Tuesday, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed the question of affordability by telling the crowd, "You're doing better than you've ever done." He blamed higher prices on former president Joe Biden, confirming the observation of CNN's Stephen Collinson that Trump's answer for everything is to blame Biden. Trump defended the tariffs that have raised prices by suggesting that the tariffs are protecting major items and that if people are feeling the pinch of higher prices, they "can give up certain products. You could give up pencils. That's under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know, they don't need that many. But you always need, you always need steel. You don't need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. But you don't need 37 dolls. So, we're doing things right." Otherwise, Trump delivered his usual rally speech. Rambling for more than an hour and a half, he attacked immigrants and confirmed that in 2018 he did, in fact, call Haiti and African nations "sh*thole countries." He attacked the board of the Federal Reserve and, while boasting of his administration's strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, said: "And now we're going to do land, because the land is much easier." Anthony Zurcher of the BBC noted that Trump told the crowd his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had told him to focus on the economy but boasted: "I haven't read practically anything off the stupid teleprompter." After the speech, at 9:00 on Tuesday night, Trump's social media account posted: "There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me! My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best. I've stopped Eight Wars, saving many millions of lives in the process, created the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, brought Business back into the United States at levels never seen before, rebuilt our Military, created the Largest Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts, EVER, closed our open and very dangerous Southern Border, when previous Administrations were unable to do so, and created an 'aura' around the United States of America that has led every Country in the World to respect us more than ever before. In addition to all of that, I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks—Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results. I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country. In addition to the Medical, I have done something that no other President has done, on three separate occasions, the last one being recently, by taking what is known as a Cognitive Examination, something which few people would be able to do very well, including those working at The New York Times, and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know. I have been told that few people have been able to 'ace' this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all. Despite all of this, the time and work involved, The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am 'slowing up,' am maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true, and knowing that I work very hard, probably harder than I have ever worked before. I will know when I am 'slowing up,' but it's not now! After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it's seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean 'THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.' They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it. They have inaccurately reported on all of my Election Results and, in fact, were forced to apologize on much of what they wrote. The best thing that could happen to this Country would be if The New York Times would cease publication because they are a horrible, biased, and untruthful 'source' of information. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" Trump's performance seems unlikely to reassure Americans that he is prioritizing their economic concerns. Congressional Republicans are not helping. The Republicans' budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"—did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance bought on the Affordable Care Act market that subsidizes that insurance. Today, Senate Republicans voted against the Democrats' measure to extend the premium tax credits for three years. The vote was 51–48, nine votes short of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. Only four Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska—voted yes. Senate Democrats, joined by Rand Paul (R-KY), then voted against a Republican bill that would have let the credits expire but would have given adults who earn less than 700% of the federal poverty line access to $1,000 annually to put toward healthcare costs if they are under 50, and $1,500 a year if they are between 50 and 65, if they are on lower-cost ACA plans with an annual deductible of $7,500. The money could not be used for abortion or "gender transition procedures" and would require verification of immigration and citizenship status. In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has rejected the idea of extending the premium tax credits but is facing a revolt from some members of his conference who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want to see the credits extended. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has launched a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring a bill to extend the credits to a vote. The measure would only pass with Democratic votes, making Johnson and other Republican leaders scramble to create their own plan. Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law fifteen years ago, a Republican alternative has remained elusive. Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan, and Laura Weiss of Punchbowl News reported today that Johnson has said he will keep the fight over healthcare going into next year. They note that no Republican "thinks it's a good idea for the [Republicans] to be talking about health care—their worst issue—during an election year." Democrats are likely to emphasize that the cost for extending the ACA premium tax credits—which benefit everyday Americans and which the Republicans did not extend in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act—would be about $350 billion over ten years. The cost for extending the 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations and which they did extend, will be more than $4 trillion over the same time period. The Punchbowl reporters note that Republican confusion over healthcare is just one more sign of trouble for Republicans in the House. "[W]e won't say that the House is in total chaos," they wrote this morning. "Total chaos is when members unleash censure resolutions against each other or a trio of House Republicans publicly claim Speaker Mike Johnson has no business running the chamber. That was last week." They note that fear of Trump kept Republicans in line earlier in the year, but with Trump's numbers falling and voters turning to Democrats, Republicans are either planning to leave the House or protecting their own political prospects. Concerned about control of Congress after 2026, Trump and members of his administration are pressuring state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts in order to favor Republicans. In Indiana, Republican state senators have resisted their pressure, along with death threats, to pass a map that would give Republicans two districts currently dominated by Democrats, giving Republicans the entire congressional delegation. Vice President J.D. Vance and Don Trump Jr. have jumped into the struggle, and today the lobbying arm of the right-wing Heritage Institute, Heritage Action, posted on social media that "President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame." Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith confirmed that "[t]he Trump admin[istration] was VERY clear about this." Political observer John Collins commented: "Nothing shows confidence like threatening your own party." Another Hoosier seemed unconcerned with the threat that Trump would illegally withhold federal funding, posting: "We know how to roll with potholes better than any other state," with a laughing emoji. This evening, the Indiana senate rejected the new gerrymandered congressional map by a vote of 31 to 19. The vote wasn't close: Twenty-one Republicans—that is, a majority of the Republican senators—joined the 10 Democratic senators in voting no. This evening, Megan Messerly and Myah Ward of Politico reported that the White House is looking to send surrogates like Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the road instead of Trump to carry the message of affordability to the American people, leaving Trump to focus on "motivating his die-hard supporter who might not otherwise vote when he isn't on the ballot." —

 

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Something to Know - 12 December

David Brooks has been producing some excellent works regarding our American Way of life which includes all of the components of what is considered "humanities".   The complexities of what is considered a moral, stable, and productive society incorporates a mix of all fields of learning to explain the who,why, and how of a society.   If you enjoyed his conversations with Jonathan Capehart lately, you will enjoy this article from The Atlantic.   His definition of a Neoconservative as a Liberal mugged by reality set the tone for me.   I never quite understood that term before.  The no nonsense term is what makes Brooks stand out to me.

Instead of Jimmy Kimmel, I stumbled upon a video clip that kept my attention for the entire 25 minutes.   I am convinced that that following the Science is the best method of understanding where we have been, where we are now, and what the future may bring.   A visitor to our solar system that astronomers call 3l/ATLAS ventured into our solar system and our most powerful telescopes (Hubble, Webb, etc) monitored and analyzed it.   It was not your run of the mill meteor.   It appeared to be able to steer itself, leaving a trail of dust and gas with chemical and physical elements we are familiar with.   Its wake is leaving materials that seed and feed new objects in space.  It is also thought to be a probe from another object in space outside of our galaxy.   If you follow the science, our existence here on Earth is just a micro-spec in a universe about which we know very little, and maybe never will.    Enjoy the video for what it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCG7TKNk8Y

Politics

The Neocons Were Right

Not about Iraq. But the moral tenor of their political writings could be an antidote to Trumpism.

By David Brooks

Illustration by Erik Carter

What comes after Donald Trump? What compelling social vision can replace MAGA's offerings and reverse the tide of global populism? In considering these questions, I find myself returning to an unlikely group of 20th-century thinkers: the neoconservatives.

These days, when people hear the word neocons, they tend to think of Republicans who supported the Iraq War. But the notoriety the neocons attained for supporting that war has obscured their origins as a dissident faction within the American left, one that was staunchly anti-communist but mostly preoccupied with domestic policy.

Here's why the original neocon thinkers—people such as Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—can be so helpful right now: They focused their attention on the bloody crossroads where morality and politics intersect. They saw politics through the lens of not only polling and social-science data, but also literature, philosophy, psychology, and theology. They asked the big questions—not just How can we win the next election? but How can we create a civilization to be proud of ? The moral and spiritual tenor of their political writings could be a tonic for a society in moral and spiritual crisis.

Neoconservatism coalesced into a movement in the 1970s, but it has its roots in the cafeteria of the City College of New York in the late 1930s. The poor immigrant kids who would go on to found the movement were the Trotskyists who sat in one alcove of that dining hall. They spent their days arguing with one another and with the Stalinists who sat in the neighboring alcove. In those days, Kristol, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and others were convinced that communism was the future, and so it mattered what kind prevailed.

The neoconservatives all broke with Marxism during the Stalin era, and most of them became Franklin D. Roosevelt–style Democrats. Kristol fought the Nazis in Europe and realized that if communism ever came to America, it would turn into a massively corrupt criminal enterprise, which is what eventually happened in the Soviet Union. After the war, many of the neocons went on to become social scientists at places such as Harvard, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. Others became journalists or editors of magazines such as Commentary and Encounter.

Their second big shift occurred during the 1960s and '70s. Glazer went to work in the Kennedy administration, at the Housing and Home Finance Agency (the predecessor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development). In 1965, Kristol and Daniel Bell founded a magazine called The Public Interest. Swept up in the intoxicating social-science confidence of the era, they believed that we now had the knowledge to settle old ideological feuds and solve social problems scientifically. "Men are learning how to make an industrial economy work," Moynihan wrote in the magazine's first issue.

That confidence underlaid the explosion of social-policy making that helped define the '60s. Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society brought a raft of new programs that aimed to eliminate poverty and inequality. The Nixon administration followed with more in the same vein—the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, along with a 20 percent increase in Social Security benefits and proposals for both a national health-insurance system and a universal basic income for households with children.

From 1960 to 1980, federal spending increased from about $91 billion to about $584 billion. In 1960, defense spending made up about half of the federal budget. By 1980, it was down to less than a quarter. At the start of 1960, approximately 250,000 people were on welfare in New York City. At the beginning of 1969, about 900,000 were.

The new programs did not produce the intended results. By the 1970s, the economy was in terrible shape, pushed into a recession by the Vietnam War, an oil embargo, and the high cost of Johnson's Great Society. In May 1975, the unemployment rate hit 9 percent. A few years later, the inflation rate neared 15 percent. The productivity rate started to decline in 1973—and the poverty rate ticked upward.

Social measures, too, painted a grim picture. From 1960 to 1980, divorce rates more than doubled. The share of children born out of wedlock more than tripled. Violent-crime rates also more than tripled. Drug use exploded. The public-housing projects that had been built with such promise turned into hellscapes. As someone who grew up in New York City in the '70s, I'm astounded by the level of social disorder we all learned to live with. Pretty much everyone I knew got mugged. In 1972 and 1973, there was a serial castrator and killer in Manhattan nicknamed Charlie Chop-Off. He was never caught, and such was the general chaos that it wasn't even that big of a story.

The neocons were mostly immigrant kids who'd grown up in places like Brooklyn, when the borough was still a haven for working-class New Yorkers. They had seen their families rise out of poverty by embracing the common bourgeois virtues: hard work, thrift, self-reliance, self-discipline, respect for tradition, and an intense focus on education. When the counterculture arose in the '60s, the neocons were dismayed to see affluent kids at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia dropping out, doing acid, denouncing the industrious and traditional culture of their parents, and embracing the social anarchy resulting from that culture's erosion.

The disillusionment of the '60s made neoconservatism bipartisan. Some neocons—such as Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter—became Republicans. Others—such as Moynihan and Glazer—stuck with the Democrats. But they remained a coherent and ever more influential intellectual force in American life.

The events of the '60s and '70s taught the men and women who would become neocons two big lessons. The first was that society is a lot more complicated than it looks, and that many attempts to reengineer it end up producing no benefits at all—or worse. A 1971 essay by Glazer in Commentary, "The Limits of Social Policy," captured the chastened mood. So did Kristol's famous definition of a neoconservative: "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." In 1973, in another essay for Commentary, the neoconservative political scientist Aaron Wildavsky observed that experts had a lot of information about society's problems, but nobody knew how to fix them. Consequently, "vast amounts of money and even vaster amounts of enthusiasm were poured into various programs that ultimately ended in failure and bewilderment."

Those commonly associated with the neoconservative crew were not against trying to use government to relieve poverty or inequality—Moynihan, Glazer, and Bell were not libertarians or even small-government conservatives. But their insight was that if you're going to launch a big federal program, you had better acknowledge that most programs—whether job training, education reform, or efforts to reduce juvenile delinquency—fail. You had better have a lot of evidence that your idea will work, and you had better proceed cautiously, experimentally, and without building big bureaucracies.

Given this hard-earned skepticism and epistemological modesty, it is ironic that many later conservatives—including me—who had supped at the neocon table would come to embrace a grand project to create democracy in Iraq. In fact, the single most famous neoconservative essay on foreign policy is Jeane Kirkpatrick's 1979 article "Dictatorships & Double Standards," also in Commentary, in which she explains that laying the groundwork for a democracy where one does not yet exist requires decades of civil-society work. "It seems clear that the architects of contemporary American foreign policy have little idea of how to go about encouraging the liberalization of an autocracy," she wrote. Somehow, 24 years later, that lesson was forgotten on the way to Iraq.

Another important truth the neocons learned from the '60s is that you can't separate policy making from moral character. The political scientist James Q. Wilson put it this way in The Public Interest in 1985: "The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed—and experienced—over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry."

When trying to effect social change, Wilson continued, "the essential first step is to acknowledge that at root, in almost every area of important public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as school children, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers, or voters and public officials. Not only is such conduct desirable in its own right, it appears now to be necessary if large improvements are to be made in those matters we consider problems: schooling, welfare, crime, and public finance."

When neocons evaluated any policy proposal, the core questions they asked were: Does this moralize or demoralize the people it touches? Does this induce them to behave more responsibly or less? By morality, they didn't mean the kind of fancy notions explored by Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. They just meant the basics: Does this policy encourage people to work hard, be good parents and neighbors, delay gratification, and recognize not just their rights but their responsibilities?

Neocons like Kristol had no problem with Social Security, which reduced poverty among seniors. Giving seniors money doesn't give them a greater incentive to grow old. But neoconservatives noticed that the number of single-parent families surged following the War on Poverty's expansion of welfare. A guaranteed income, they argued, reduced labor-force participation and the desire to work. They noticed that when you give a country permission to rack up a huge federal deficit, you are giving people permission to behave more and more selfishly toward future generations. So the neocons put virtue at the center of their public-policy thinking; they were not afraid to be moralistic.

They rejected the privatization of morality, which they saw happening around them, especially in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. During that hyper-individualistic moment, many Americans valorized the idea that a person's values, tastes, and cultural attitudes are a private affair. Because everybody's moral standards are different, no one should try to impose their morality on someone else. Live and let live. That idea is still with us.

The neocons, by contrast, believed that humans are social and spiritual creatures whose souls are either ennobled or degraded by the systems, cultures, and behaviors in which we are enmeshed. We're constantly influencing and being influenced by one another. We're all reliant on a shared pool of moral capital—the values, norms, behaviors, and institutions that make it easier for people to be good. When you privatize morality, you drain the pool of shared moral capital.

The neocons inspected each of society's systems, trying to identify ways they ennobled or degraded people. For example, their support for capitalism was ambivalent because, although capitalism encourages risk taking and industriousness (good for the economy), it also tends to inflame greed and philistinism (bad for the soul). Bell's 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, noted that although capitalism relies on farsighted, self-disciplined people to create value and grow the economy, the advertising and the consumerist mentality that capitalism generates encourage shortsightedness and self-indulgence.

The neoconservatives also paid enormous attention to the mediating institutions of society, those entities that successfully transmit values from one generation to the next—families, neighborhoods, congregations, civic organizations. The neocons argued that the left, seeing society almost exclusively in terms of the individual and the state, gave short shrift to these valuable institutions. Because neocons saw them as seedbeds of character and as cultural shock absorbers for when times get hard, they were concerned that the expansion of the state seemed to be weakening and displacing these institutions. Though many neocons were not religious themselves, they were alarmed by the decline of religion and of congregational life. They were alarmed, too, by the policy of deinstitutionalization, which took mentally ill people out of mental-health facilities, put them on the street, and called it freedom. This kind of approach, neocons argued, was hopelessly hyper-individualized, placing the "freedom" of the individual before the safety of the community.

The neocons also paid enormous attention to the prevailing ethos of their time—what we might call the spirit of the age. They believed that this ethos was not driven primarily by economic and political forces, but shaped by shifts in culture and ideas. "Individuals, families, churches, and communities cannot operate in isolation, cannot long maintain values at odds with those legitimated by the state and popularized by the culture," Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative historian, wrote in The Public Interest in 1994. So if the wider assumptions of society are shaped by hyper-individualism, antinomianism, and (as Christopher Lasch put it) a culture of narcissism, then society is likely to deteriorate. One of Moynihan's famous essays, published in The American Scholar in 1993, was "Defining Deviancy Down," which theorized that as the amount of deviant behavior in a community rises, people tend to define behavior that was once considered deviant as normal and acceptable.

While old-fashioned conservatives cited Edmund Burke and libertarians cited Adam Smith, neocons never tired of quoting Alexis de Tocqueville. He shaped how they saw society—as a single civilization in which politics and culture, economics and morality, democracy and spirituality were all fundamentally inseparable. The spirit of civilization shapes who people are, how they perceive reality, and what they think is right and wrong. In every endeavor, the crucial question is: What sort of people are we nurturing into being?

The neoconservatives believed that they were living amid a crisis of values. Not a clash between two different value systems but a crisis in the very idea of value. Seduced by social-science rationalism, moral relativism, or political partisanship, people had trouble thinking clearly about what separates a morally healthy society from a morally unhealthy one. This created a void in the soul of society and engendered a sense of alienation. "Secular rationalism has been unable to produce a compelling, self-justifying moral code," Kristol said in 1991. The result is nihilism—an amoral culture in which people grow up without coherent values.

So how can neoconservative thinking help us today? The first big lesson of neoconservatism is that character is destiny. That lesson applies whether you're talking about the character of a leader, an organization, or a nation. If you disregard truth—as many Republicans plainly do these days—you will wind up in some pretty ugly places.

If you want to improve the character of a nation or an organization, you have to change its culture so that it nurtures basic decency. Which leads to the second lesson of neoconservatism: The most important values in a democratic society are the pedestrian bourgeois virtues. Aristocratic societies may do better at inspiring heroism, genius, love of honor. But democratic societies rely on showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity, respecting traditions.

The third crucial insight from the neoconservatives is that culture drives history. The assumptions people rely on, the mental categories in their heads, the things they admire and disdain, the way they process the world, their norms and habits—all of this will determine how they behave.

But perhaps the most important belief that the neoconservatives can impart to us is that the American dream is real. The original neocons, the sons and daughters of immigrants, aspired to make it in America and contribute to their adopted home. If libertarians oriented their politics around freedom, and progressives oriented their politics around equality, the neocons tended to orient theirs around social mobility. They wanted to create a world in which poor boys and girls like themselves could rise and succeed. They understood that this ascent required not just economic opportunity, but also the right values.

Today, roughly 70 percent of Americans say they don't believe in the American dream. That loss of faith is like a giant bomb detonated in the middle of our society, robbing us of our central, unifying vision. Absent that shared vision of possibility, people revert to a tribal, us-versus-them morality. If the ghosts of the original neocons have anything to tell us about specific policy choices, it's that we need to do what we can to expand social mobility and restore faith in the American dream.

The other thing the ghosts of the neocons would tell us is that the fight for the American dream is as much moral as political or economic. When he was running for president in 2020, Joe Biden was right to say that the election was a struggle for the soul of America. The problem was that neither he nor the people in his administration knew how to wage a moral and cultural battle. Trump, in contrast, is a genius at cultural warfare. Because of their history going back to the New Deal, Democrats are more comfortable talking about expanding health insurance, investing in infrastructure, and reducing prescription-drug prices. All of that is important. But they will continually lose to MAGA's cultural warriors unless they can connect those policies to a story about reversing America's moral decline. This is where a new and repurposed neoconservatism can help them.

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This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline "Bring Back the Neocons."

About the Author

David Brooks

David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

Slightly Edited Version of Today's Andy Borowitz

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Trump Enraged After Gold Paint Peels off FIFA Peace Prize Andy Borowitz Dec 11   READ IN APP   Dan Mullan/Getty Images WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump exploded with rage on Thursday after gold paint peeled off his FIFA Peace Prize, White House sources revealed. The regrettable incident occurred in the Oval Office as Trump was celebrating his recent pardon of the former Honduras President and convicted drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández. As Trump lifted the trophy to show it off to Hernández, flakes of gold paint cascaded to the ground, causing Trump to roar, "Peace Prize? More like piece of shit!" Attempting to appease Trump, FIFA released a statement stressing that they had used "only the highest quality gold paint, like that used on the Oval Office, the new White House ballroom, and your hair." this is the actual version of TBR this morning Trump Enraged After Gold Paint Peels off FIFA Peace Prize Andy Borowitz Dec 11   READ IN APP   Dan Mullan/Getty Images WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump exploded with rage on Thursday after gold paint peeled off his FIFA Peace Prize, White House sources revealed. The regrettable incident occurred in the Oval Office as Trump was celebrating his recent pardon of the former Honduras President and convicted drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández. As Trump lifted the trophy to show it off to Hernández, flakes of gold paint cascaded to the ground, causing Trump to roar, "Peace Prize? More like piece of shit!" Attempting to appease Trump, FIFA released a statement stressing that they had used "only the highest quality gold paint, like that used on the Oval Office, the new White House ballroom, and your hair."

this is the actual version this morning (for you purists)

Trump Enraged After Gold Paint Peels off FIFA Peace Prize

Andy Borowitz Dec 11

READ IN APP

Dan Mullan/Getty Images

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump exploded with rage on Thursday after gold paint peeled off his FIFA Peace Prize, White House sources revealed.

The regrettable incident occurred in the Oval Office as Trump was celebrating his recent pardon of the former Honduras President and convicted drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández.

As Trump lifted the trophy to show it off to Hernández, flakes of gold paint cascaded to the ground, causing Trump to roar, "Peace Prize? More like piece of shit!"

Attempting to appease Trump, FIFA released a statement stressing that they had used "only the highest quality gold paint, like that used on the Oval Office, the new White House ballroom, and your hair."

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Juan Matute

CCRC