“Just Like the Ones I Used to Know...”

1. According to Billboard, this is the oldest English-language Christmas carol, dating back to the 1650s:

A. “Silent Night”

B. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”

C. “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”

D. “The Holly and the Ivy”

Answer: C, “God Rest Ye Merry.” Read this article. I really like that song. And notice that no, it’s not “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” One of the most important commas in all of commadom.

2. There is a theory these days holding that “O Come, All Ye Faithful” was written with secret political intent, as a rallying crying for what cause?

A. The Stuart Restoration of 1660

B. The attempted Stuart retaking of the throne in 1745 under “Bonnie Prince Charlie”

C. The consolidation of the Austrian Empire in 1804

D. Napoleon’s return from exile in Elba in 1815

Answer: B, the Bonnie Prince Charlie episode. So says Bennett Zon, the head of the Music Department at Durham University. What, you know better?

3. According to a 2015 tally by FiveThirtyEight, what is the most covered Christmas song of all time?

A. “Silent Night”

B. “White Christmas”

C. “Jingle Bells”

D. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

Answer: A, “Silent Night.” Followed by “White Christmas,” second, and “Jingle Bells,” third. “Have Yourself” was seventh.

4. According to a 2021 YouGov poll, what do Americans think is the worst Christmas song of all time?

A. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”

B. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”

C. “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”

D. “Santa Baby”

Answer: D, “Santa Baby.” It nosed out “Grandma” by one percentage point, so, within the margin of error. Still, it was liked overall by 68 percent–32 percent. Great trivia here: It was co-written by Phil Springer, who, first of all, is still alive (!) and second of all went on to write songs with Utah GOP Senator Orrin Hatch, who was something of a tunesmith. And there’s more politics to this: The co-composer was Joan Javits, the niece (I think) of longtime liberal Republican New York Senator Jacob Javits. And I don’t see what’s so bad about it. It’s a fine song.

5. And according to a 2021 ranking by SmoothRadio.com, what is the best country Christmas song of all time?

A. “Jingle Bell Rock,” by Bobby Helms

B. “Blue Christmas,” by Elvis Presley

C. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” by Brenda Lee

D. “Christmases When You Were Mine,” by Taylor Swift

Answer: C, “Rockin’ Around.” Great song, great guitar, pretty cool sax solo. Brenda Lee was 13 when she record this!

6. Which of these artists has never recorded a Christmas song?

A. Snoop Dogg

B. They Might Be Giants

C. Bee Gees

D. Foo Fighters

Answer: Surprisingly, C, Bee Gees. Look it up! Snoop appears to have done a number of holiday tunes. They Might Be Giants made a Christmas E.P. with five songs, and Foo Fighters recorded Chuck Berry’s classic “Run Rudolph Run,” also covered by Keith Richards and Dave Edmunds.

Almost everyone has been piling on that pitiful troika of elite university presidents after their congressional testimony on Tuesday. A few other folks, people I know and respect like Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times and Jay Michaelson of The Daily Beast, have added some valuable nuance, arguing that in context, the position the presidents were defending actually had merit.

I agree with the main points both made in their columns—in effect, that Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s disingenuous grilling of the presidents, which conflated free speech with targeted harassment, set a trap that forced them to appear to equivocate about antisemitism. But I want to make a different point, one that is sharply critical of the presidents on different grounds. I was personally offended by their gross incompetence, and it wouldn’t bother me in the least if they were all fired simply for that reason (if any of them are forced out, of course, it won’t be because of that).

Here’s what I mean. As the president of Harvard, Penn, or MIT, you are by definition one of America’s leading representatives of the liberal values of inquiry, critical thinking, science, anti-superstition, and, yes, free speech. On your home turf, you are confronted from time to time, or maybe more frequently than that, with situations in which some of these values come into conflict with each other, and you have to make a difficult decision. The national media, especially the right-wing media, is monitoring every move you make, every syllable you utter.

You exist, that is, at the center of an ideological tornado. You know this, or should. And you show up to Capitol Hill so unspeakably ill prepared that you—and your coterie of almost-certainly overpaid handlers—haven’t prepped for exactly the line of questioning that Stefanik pressed upon you? Indefensible.

A memorable moment in a 1988 presidential debate helps explain the key error the trio made. CNN anchor Bernard Shaw opened the proceedings by asking Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis about his opposition to the death penalty. “If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered,” Shaw asked, “would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

Dukakis restated his opposition to the death penalty with all the ardor of someone reading the phone book (what’s a phone book, you ask? This). The next day, some commentators criticized Shaw for being a little blunt, but mostly people laid into Dukakis for not saying something like: “First of all, Bernie, how dare you talk that way, even hypothetically, about my wife? You should be ashamed. And second of all, if I got my hands on the guy, they wouldn’t need the death penalty.”

Cheap? Theatrical? Sure. But it isn’t insane for people to want to see leaders show a little emotion about emotional things.

These presidents made the Dukakis error. They showed no emotion about one of the most emotional topics in the history of the human race, antisemitism. Harvard’s Claudine Gay said the right words, twice; she said hateful antisemitic speech was “personally abhorrent to me.” But she spoke with all the passion of someone giving a passerby directions to Widener Library.

What she and the others needed to do was show a little passion. Passion would communicate that this actually matters to them in a deep way. And they could still make the point they went on to make. It isn’t complicated. They could have said: “Congresswoman, antisemitism repulses me. When I hear someone say ‘gas the Jews,’ or when I watched those people march with those Nazi-like torches in Charlottesville in 2017, I shake with rage. I will never tolerate that on my campus. And yet, Congresswoman, universities must foster debate and allow free speech, even offensive, disgusting speech. Maybe you don’t understand this. I notice that your civil liberties and free speech vote ratings are nothing to write home about.” Boom: from defense to offense.

I know a lot of liberals will scoff at this point, but it’s quite serious. For better or worse we live in an age of theater, and right-wingers are just really good at theater. We must deal with reality as it is. Countless Americans, likely the majority, are getting their news in sound bites that elide context and nuance—on Fox News, yes, but also in 15-second videos on social media. How do we think that testimony has been playing on TikTok over the last three days?

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it all the same, that I obviously hold no brief for Stefanik. She’s a conscienceless fascist who was once a fairly reasonable conservative but took a sip from the poisoned MAGA chalice in 2016, and her career has been one long brownshirt rally ever since.

But the awfulness of her public persona just reinforces my main point. We are at war in this country. On the one side are the values embodied by Stefanik and Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and the soulless evangelical leaders who know exactly who Trump is but have elevated him to savior status because he wants to eradicate “vermin” like you and me. On the other side are the values represented, however imperfectly, by (among other institutions) our universities, great and not so great.

And if you’re on the liberal side, and you decide to waltz into the lion’s den, you had damn well better be ready. You are charged with defending a way of thinking and living that is under ceaseless attack, and you have a responsibility to represent that way of thinking and living for the rest of us who believe in it but don’t have the opportunity to appear before Congress. These presidents let half a country down, and for that, they should be ashamed.

Everybody is in a tizzy about Joe Manchin’s retirement announcement. And maybe they should be. The conventional wisdom for months, or even for a couple years, has been that a presidential candidacy by the West Virginia senator under the “centrist” No Labels banner would mean the end for Joe Biden, and that’s the take in most of the insta-analyses I’ve read over the last 24 hours.

It’s also what I’ve always thought, and it stands to reason. Not because Manchin is a Democrat. But because it has been assumed that he splits the anti-Trump vote. But lately, even before this announcement, I’ve begun to wonder: What if Manchin is more likely to split the anti-Biden vote? In a moment, I’ll get to that case.

But first, let’s address the ramifications of Manchin’s announcement for control of the Senate. This, not the presidential implications, was what the media focused on first—that his decision imperils Democratic control of the Senate.

That’s a kind of base-covering or box-checking journalism that I suppose mainstream outlets feel they have a need to do, but it’s silly. Manchin had zero chance of holding his seat against GOP Governor Jim Justice. Not 10 percent. Not 5 percent. Zero. Justice has been consistently ahead by double digits in recent polls. One outlier poll—conducted, interestingly, for a GOP super PAC—had it at 6; but the most recent public polls pegged Justice’s lead at 12, 13, 22, and 14 percent.

The Democratic Party is all but dead in West Virginia. I say this with sadness, as a native of the state who remembers a day when everyone, from every member of Congress on down to the agriculture commissioner (Gus Douglass!), was a Democrat. The place was never a liberal nirvana, but there were a number of progressives in office, notably Ken Hechler, one of those longtime members of Congress, who’d been a Truman speechwriter and was the only member of the House to march with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.

Today? Three of the 34 state senators are Democrats. Three! They could hold their caucus meetings in a closet. And only 10 of the 98 state delegates are Dems (there are two vacancies). The three state senators are from the university towns of Morgantown and Huntington. Everywhere else, the party barely exists.

So that Manchin’s seat was lost was already a foregone conclusion, and anyone who argued otherwise was wasting time.

Now let’s get to a possible Manchin presidential candidacy. First of all, I don’t think it’s certain that he’ll run. I’d call it likely but not preordained. No Labels officials have said repeatedly that they don’t want to help reelect Trump. There is of course no reason to take those avowals at face value. But they can be leveraged by an effective Democratic opposition into pressure to force No Labels to stand down if polling shows consistently that it’d be doing exactly that. So I think there is still a chance that No Labels doesn’t field a candidate, or can’t get anyone of Manchin’s stature to agree to accept its nod, and ends up with a Howard Schultz–level figure.

Second, even if Manchin does run, it is no longer manifestly obvious that he hurts Biden more than he hurts Trump. Here’s the case, which rests on three points.

One: Manchin is basically against abortion rights. His ratings record from the pro-life groups is mixed, but that’s because he has a history of voting for larger Democratic bills that contain some language about abortion that those groups don’t like. And he did criticize the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. But on stand-alone abortion bills, he’s been consistently against choice.

The 2024 election is going to be as direct a nationwide referendum on women’s reproductive rights as we’ve ever had in this country. And as we’ve been seeing since last year and saw again Tuesday, masses of voters are heading to the polls to say they want the government to do something to preserve abortion rights. Manchin’s going to be asked about this constantly if he runs. He’ll bob and weave, but if the Democrats do a good job of letting people know about the anti-choice aspects of his record—for example, he was the only Senate Democrat to join 50 Republicans in opposing a 2022 bill that sought to codify Roe v. Wade—very few pro-choice Americans will vote for him. And that category includes not just Democrats but a majority of independents and even some Republicans.

Two: He’s just not that popular. And to the extent that he is popular, he is more popular among Republicans than Democrats.

In a recent PRRI poll, Manchin was viewed favorably by 12 percent, while 41 percent viewed him unfavorably. This man who gets so much positive Beltway press was viewed very favorably by 1 percent. This by the way was Americans, not West Virginians. And there’s a recent Morning Consult poll that ranked the popularity of every senator (these were statewide polls). It found Manchin to be one of the most unpopular senators in the country. Now that’s largely because he’s a Democrat in a Republican state. There are only seven senators who are underwater in the poll, and Manchin is one of them (the only senators deeper underwater are Susan Collins, Ron Johnson, and Mitch McConnell, who is down there in Mariana Trench territory).

But here’s the good news for Manchin, according to Morning Consult. Manchin’s 42–48 numbers are actually an improvement over the last time they polled this. And that improvement has been “driven largely by Republican voters.” That echoes the PRRI poll, which breaks down that 12 percent favorable rating by party. Manchin is lowest among Democrats (7 percent), with independents in the middle (13 percent), and Republicans viewing him most favorably (18 percent).

So a surge of disaffected Democrats is going to back this guy? I don’t buy it. In fact, if we agree that somewhere around 55 percent of Republicans are MAGA and 45 percent are not, which seems about fair based on polls, that tells me that there are, at least potentially, more—far more—disaffected Republicans who might pull for Manchin. If he runs, I suspect his polls will tell him this, and he’ll go hunting where the ducks are, as Barry Goldwater put it.

Three: his unapologetic pro–fossil fuel position. Again, it will be up to the Democrats to publicize this properly if he runs. But if they do, he will perform very poorly among voters who want the United States to move away from fossil fuels—and again, that is a category that includes independents and even some Republicans.

So it’s possible the conventional wisdom is way off here. The PRRI poll data seem to support my case. In the Biden-Trump head-to-head matchup, Biden leads 48–46. When they throw in Manchin and Cornel West, Manchin garners 10 percent and West 5, but Biden still leads Trump, 41–38. If Manchin were stealing all his votes from Biden, wouldn’t Trump have been ahead in the four-way?

Manchin is a Democrat in name. But his high-profile positions are essentially Republican ones. Or at least enough of them are that an effective Democratic spin operation can convince Democratic and a majority of independent voters that Manchin just isn’t a real option for them. It would be a delightful thing if we woke up next November 6 to see that Manchin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cost Trump, not Biden, the White House. It would certainly be the outcome they all deserve.

Whenever I look at the latest polls and start to freak out about Donald Trump winning the presidency again, I calm myself by remembering that the guy is very likely going to be an at-least-once convicted felon by next November. While that won’t bother his fans, I still think it will bother enough swing voters that he will lose, and maybe spectacularly.

That scenario got a little more likely Thursday when the California judge overseeing a misconduct trial against Trump attorney and coup-plotter John Eastman made a “preliminary finding” of culpability on Eastman’s part for his attempts to halt the certification of the 2020 election results.

What’s the upshot? No, Eastman isn’t guilty of anything just yet. But he is now closer to being disbarred, and that could make it more likely that he flips. MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance wrote on X: “If John Eastman loses his license in the bar proceeding, it incentiv[iz]es him (or would incentivize a rationale person) to plead & cooperate in the criminal case to avoid prison (since he’s already lost his license).”

Eastman is one of the 19 defendants in the Fulton County, Georgia, RICO case against Trump and others for conspiring to steal the election. Four named defendants in that case have already pleaded out and agreed to provide testimony against other defendants: lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Kenneth Chesebro and bail bondsman Scott Hall.

And don’t forget former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who got an immunity deal from special counsel Jack Smith in Smith’s January 6–related case against Trump. It was revealed just last week that Meadows has testified under oath in that case three times since agreeing to the deal. It was this news that led Chris Christie to go on Morning Joe and crow: “This is deadly. It’s done. [Trump]’s going to be convicted. It’s over.”

On top of all this, of course, was the main Trump family drama of the week, the testimony by his sons in the New York attorney general’s case against the Trump Organization. Don Jr. in his testimony tried to pin any misstatements about Trump family property values on Mazars, the accounting firm the Trumps used; Eric basically denied that he worked on financial statements. Ivanka Trump is set to testify next week, after a judge late Thursday denied her motion that requiring her to testify during a school week would place an “undue hardship” on her (these people are so shameless). The case could cost the family $250 million.

But the real cases are likely to cost Donald Trump a lot more: the White House. His future. His freedom.

I’m telling you, this is all going to catch up with Trump at the worst (or, depending on your point of view, the best) possible time. Yes, Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida did Trump a favor this week by suggesting she might postpone next May’s trial date in the Trump case she’s hearing, the one about the classified documents. She might move it to after the election.

A bummer, and she’s a hack, as she’s already proven to us. But fine. The other cases will proceed. And high-profile people who had direct contact with Trump have flipped and will testify against him. Christie, whatever else we think of him, is a former federal prosecutor, so when he says what he said about Meadows, he’s speaking from experience.

We’re entering what’s going to be a maddening and horrifying time. In all likelihood, none of these other Republican candidates is going to make a charge at Trump. They’re just too afraid of him. Nikki Haley criticized him obliquely a few days ago, but no one (save Christie) is going to tell the truth about him because they know what will happen to them: They’ll sink like stones. So they’re in an impossible position—of their own making, by the way, because every one of them cheered Trump’s rise—whereby if they don’t go after the front-runner, he’ll be untouched and stay 25 points ahead of the field, and if they do, it will hurt them, and Trump’s lead will likely only grow.

So we’re in for 10 weeks—until the January 15 Iowa caucuses—of poll after poll showing Trump ahead and probably gaining. No piece of bad news will matter. He’ll roll in Iowa. Next will come New Hampshire. No date has yet been set for that primary, but it’s expected to be sometime in January. In New Hampshire, Trump is if anything further ahead than he is in Iowa. Then there’s not another GOP primary until South Carolina on February 24 (there will be Nevada and Virgin Islands caucuses on February 8). In other words, if Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, the race is basically over, and there will be a full month of headlines calling Trump victorious and unstoppable.

Actually—not all headlines. In fact, on the very day, January 16, that we’ll wake up to headlines blaring, “Trump Sails to Victory in Iowa,” we will also be greeted by this headline: “E. Jean Carroll Damages Trial Against Trump Starts Today.” Remember that New York Judge Lewis Kaplan has already said that Trump raped Carroll in the normally understood sense of the term. So readers, and voters, are going to be reminded of that. Then the January 6 trial, the one in which Meadows flipped, starts the day before Super Tuesday. And so on.

Trump is a cornered animal. As the walls close in, he is going to go insane. Nothing in his pampered life has prepared him for the reckoning that’s coming his way. He’s gotten out of everything, from the Vietnam draft to all the bankruptcies, to the impeachments, when he obviously committed high crimes and misdemeanors. His skating days are over.

In one way, you have to be impressed by the Republicans. They keep going further and further right, completely undeterred. They keep somehow finding these people. And they keep elevating them. And now, MAGA Mike Johnson—a hard-core theocrat who is, in terms of his obviously deeply held philosophical beliefs, to Jim Jordan’s right, and indeed perhaps well to Jim Jordan’s right—is two heartbeats away from the presidency, after having been elected House speaker.

No one except Capitol Hill reporters and people who are such serious politics junkies that they need help had heard of Johnson until this week. I sure hadn’t. There are 221 Republicans in the House of Representatives right now. I’m guessing I could name 80 of them. That leaves around 140 of them who are totally unknown to me, and it’s my job to follow this stuff. Clearly, a larger number than that is completely unknown to America beyond their own districts.

In fact, I’m not sure even Hill reporters knew much about Johnson before this week. Consider how Punchbowl News—a Beltway insider operation if ever there was one—described Johnson to its subscription-only readers Wednesday morning:

In case you haven’t Googled him yet, Johnson is a 51-year-old, fourth-term member of the House. He’s the House Republican Conference vice chair. He’s got a pair of degrees from Louisiana State University and has seats on the Judiciary and Armed Services committees. His district, which hugs the western part of the state, is as red as they come. It’s also home to some big military facilities, including Barksdale Air Force Base and Fort Johnson.

Johnson could be the first former chair of the Republican Study Committee to become speaker.

The Louisiana Republican is the son of a Shreveport firefighter badly injured and disabled on the job. The now congressman worked as a college professor, conservative talk radio host and columnist. But it was his roles on behalf of several religious groups—as an attorney and spokesperson—that launched his political career. Johnson is married with four children. If he’s elected, Johnson will enter the speakership as a man with exceedingly modest means. Johnson has at least $280,000 in debt and no disclosed assets.

All of that could have been lifted from the guy’s Wikipedia page.

And it tells us nothing useful about who he actually is, politically. It makes him sound pretty bland and anodyne. Someone like Johnson benefits from this lack of knowledge and curiosity about the backbenchers. If you’re not out there saying outrageous things on a weekly basis like Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz, there’s some kind of assumption that you must be a normie.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost none of them are normies. Here’s a thought experiment. I’m just going to choose three GOP backbenchers at random by going to House.gov and clicking around. And we’ll learn together about them.

1. Sam Graves, Missouri 6th district. Never heard of him. A quick Google reveals that he tweeted: “I stand with President Trump. Every legal vote must be counted in complete transparency.” And he, like Johnson, voted against seating Joe Biden. Lifetime CPAC vote rating: 83 percent.
2. Russ Fulcher, Idaho 1st district. Never heard of him either. He also voted against seating Biden. He was a Ted Cruz delegate to the 2016 GOP convention. Lifetime CPAC rating: 94 percent.
3. William Timmons, South Carolina, 4th district. Also never heard of him. Another election denier. He, like Fulcher, was one of 126 Republicans to sign an amicus brief in a lawsuit brought in Texas to stop the counting of votes in Pennsylvania. Lifetime CPAC rating: 92 percent.

I expect I could go on and on. The point I’m making here is that this is who the anonymous members of the House GOP conference are. They may toil in relative anonymity, but that doesn’t mean they’re very different from Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re mostly like her, just with less of a talent for getting attention.

This circles us back to Johnson. Over these last two days, we have been learning things, and they paint an unnerving picture. Just watch the short clip in this tweet and follow the logic of these words: “You remember in the late ’60s we invented things, like no-fault divorce laws. We invented the sexual revolution. We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion in 1973, where the state, the government, sanctions the killing of the unborn. I mean, we know that we’re living in a completely amoral society. And so people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there is no right and wrong.”

He also blamed abortion for the shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund. Again, follow the logic: “Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America. You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

Johnson is, interestingly, one of just three American politicians to sit on the advisory board of a British organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC, which claims to be striking blows in support of “our moral, cultural, economic and spiritual foundations to imagine a future where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their homes, communities, and beyond.”* The other U.S. pols on the board are far-right Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw. As luck would have it, ARC is hosting a huge event next week at the O2 arena, sort of London’s equivalent of Madison Square Garden, starring, wait for it, Jordan Peterson. ARC was co-founded by Baroness Philippa Stroud, the former CEO of the Legatum Institute, which was the leading pro-Brexit think tank in Britain.

It tells me something about Johnson that, of all the hard-right politicians in the United States from which ARC had to choose, it selected Johnson (along with Lee and Crenshaw) as one who best represents its values. What it suggests is that Johnson, though unknown to you and me, has developed a profile over the years in right-wing circles worldwide that share his view that we inhabit “a completely amoral society.”

And this is what gave birth to the headline on this column. Jim Jordan is a hard-right warrior, a front-line infantryman eager to storm the Omaha Beach of the culture wars. Nothing about him screams theocrat. Johnson, however, is exactly that. He may not be speaker long enough to try to impose his eighteenth-century views on America in any meaningful way, but let’s make no mistake about who he is and how he—and so many other rank-and-file Republican members of the House—can carry around hard-right and anti-democratic views and never, ever be scrutinized for them.

* This article originally misstated the number of American politicians on the ARC advisory board.