Cowardly Pete Hegseth Is This Week’s Proof of the GOP’s Moral Rot

Pete Hegseth is having one of the worst weeks a Cabinet secretary has had in recent American history. It’s very richly deserved. He’s a bombastic idiot. He’s a liar. And he’s a weasel: Under fire for a second military strike on an alleged drug boat, which killed two survivors of the first strike and was possibly a war crime, he has publicly shifted all responsibility to a uniformed Naval officer who cannot defend himself in public. Finally, I’d add that he has utter contempt for the historic rules of honorable military engagement, but the video that emerged this week of him paying rhetorical homage to those rules back in 2016 when Democrats ran the Pentagon proves that he doesn’t even live according to that benighted “principle” and instead operates on the basis of no principle other than the usual Republican ones—political advantage and power.

He’s a disaster as defense secretary. But here’s a question that must be pondered this week: Didn’t we all know this? Wasn’t there ample reason to suspect that a talk-show host would be in way over his head in running the largest corporation in the U.S. government? Could anyone—anyone—look in the mirror back in January and say to themselves: “Yes, of all the possible nominees in this vast country to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth is the best possible choice”?

Of course we knew this. And yet, he made it through. Why? I see three reasons, all tangled up with one another, because they all describe different aspects of the total moral decay of the Republican Party.

Let’s start with the most obvious reason: Trump wanted him. In other words, no President Trump, no Secretary Hegseth, not in a jillion years. It took an ill-informed demagogue who dodged the draft and thinks soldiers buried in Arlington Cemetery are “suckers” and thinks cable news is the pinnacle of human endeavor to come up with an appointment like this. And this, as we all know, is why Trump chose him: He was a snarling cable host who looked the part and hated DEI. People knew at the time. Exiled Republican Adam Kinzinger posted last November, when Trump nominated Hegseth: “Wow. Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.”

But of course, few Republicans were willing to say so, which brings us to reason two: the total abdication of constitutional responsibilities by Trump’s party. Well, not quite total. Three Republicans did vote against Hegseth: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell. JD Vance had to hustle up to the Capitol to break the tie.

But what that means is that 47 senators who had to know better (well, Tommy Tuberville excepted) voted for him. Mississippi’s Roger Wicker has been in the news this week because he chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is thus deeply involved in the question of how Congress will proceed in probing the second strike on that vessel on September 2. And, as Wicker is not tightly identified with the MAGA movement, I’ve seen him referred to this week as a comparative voice of reason.

Really? Go watch his statement back in January explaining his vote for Hegseth to see what a voice of reason he was then. “Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” he allowed. But so was Trump, when he flitted down that escalator. “That may be what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice,” he continued. Hegseth would bring “a new warrior ethos” and “energy” and “fresh ideas.” Those descriptors might in fact be accurate, but not in a good way.

Wicker has been around Washington for three decades. He’s a former Air Force officer. There is zero chance he actually believed those words that he spoke that January day. But he spoke them, and 46 of his colleagues mouthed similarly mendacious platitudes.

Those platitudes received endless repetition on Fox News and the other right-wing propaganda outlets, which brings us to the third reason why it’s possible for such an unqualified hooligan to lead the world’s largest military. The right-wing “media” serves as an enforcer in such situations. GOP senators know very well that if they break with Trump on a big vote, the propaganda mill will target them, and that rich agribusiness magnate back home who’s a MAGA fire-breather will primary them next time, and Trump will endorse him, and goodbye Senate.

These outlets also enforce the acceptance of a certain reality among the rank and file—in which, in the current case, all the talk last winter about Hegseth’s drinking problem and his running that nonprofit into the ground were just deep-state lies. They create for the audience a world that is the direct opposite of reality.

Speaking of which … a poll came out this week—commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institute, no less—that sought to give America a fuller portrait than we usually get of the beliefs and feelings of today’s GOP. The pollster asked a few questions about conspiracy theories. Find your hat, please, and hold onto it.

One-third, exactly 33 percent, think vaccines cause autism. A little more, 36 percent, think NASA faked the moon landing. Also, 37 percent think the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated.” Forty-one percent think the September 11 attacks were carried out by actors beyond Al Qaeda and were “likely orchestrated or permitted by the U.S. government.” And 51 percent, as opposed to 40 percent who disagreed, believe the 2020 election was stolen. (Interesting side result, on another question: Fifteen percent of the poll’s respondents admitted to being racist!)

I’m not saying we can trace all this directly to Fox News. As far as I know, even Fox isn’t peddling Faurisson-esque Holocaust denialism. But Fox and the others have certainly promoted a milieu in which their consumers are encouraged to question nearly all statements of fact if liberals seem to believe those facts. From there, the algorithms of social media take over, and we’re off to the parallel-reality races.

It’s no wonder in such a world that a man like Hegseth could rise to his current position, sustained and protected by cowardice and lies. And it’s no wonder that he’s ordering the clearly illegal targeting of vessels and making allegations about them without offering any evidence. This is exactly where the moral rot that has consumed the Republican Party in this century was bound to land us.

I’m sitting here early Friday morning with the home pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post up on my screen. The president of the United States, as you know by now, has accused six Democratic legislators of sedition, or, as Donald Trump inevitably puts such things, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” adding that it is “punishable by DEATH!” He also re-Truthed a comment reading “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Trump says a lot of outrageous things, and we know why he says them. First, he’s an unhinged sociopath who knows nothing about American history (George Washington is literally the last person who’d behave as above, more on which later). Second, when he is attacked, as he was here—or as he believes he was; the sextet was actually just stating a fact of American tradition and law—he strikes back in the most juvenile way possible, since his emotional development was arrested at about age 13 (which is perhaps being generous). And third, he’s trying to distract from an otherwise bad week—arguably the worst of his second presidency, as his own party moved essentially in unanimity against him on the Epstein matter (something that, speaking of American history, I’m not sure has ever happened before).

So we know all that about him, and we’ve come to accept it. But come on. Hang them? Elected representatives of the people? Who have all served their country in the armed forces or in risky intelligence work? Not that that last point should matter one way or the other, but it does count for something. Senator Mark Kelly, for example, flew 39 combat missions during the Persian Gulf War. This was around the same time that Trump was working overtime to suppress a documentary about him that showed him to be the gangster and conman we all know him to be today.

But put these personal details to the side, and stick to the mere objective fact: A sitting president of the United States has called for the execution of six legislators. I don’t know this for certain, but it seems nearly impossible that this has happened before. I don’t think Abraham Lincoln did it, and he was dealing with actual traitors. Maybe, you know, Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan did it on a bad day. Or Andrew Johnson. He was temperamentally capable of something like this. But that hardly makes it defensible. As they were three of the worst presidents in U.S. history, that only makes it worse.

OK. Back to the Times and the Post now. How in the world is this not the top story this morning? Indeed: How is it not the only headline above the fold, the kind of headline they usually reserve for world wars?

But it’s not. It’s not even close. On my Post home page around 7 a.m. Friday, you have to spin the scroll wheel on the mouse about seven times even to see the headline and subhed, which do not, incidentally, mention the “death” part at all. (The story did appear on the upper left of the front page of today’s physical paper.) At the Times, I had to give the scroll wheel four spins before I saw the story; the headline does quote Trump’s words “punishable by death.” But the Times didn’t even put it on the front page of their physical paper—there was only a single-sentence reference to the story in a small box titled “More on the White House,” as if this was just more ho-hum news from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When I peeked at the Times on Thursday night, I noted that the headline did not even mention the death part. It read: “In Outburst, Trump Accuses Democrats of Sedition Over Video to Military.” Sweet Jesus, Times. It’s a small thing, perhaps. But “outburst”?! It’s a telling little example of how mainstream news headline writers continue to try to use the normal conventions of objective journalism style to describe behavior that is an offense against normalcy.

The headline writers at the two papers would undoubtedly snicker at me. I’m being alarmist. Trump says a lot of things. He doesn’t really mean it. Or, even if he does mean it in the moment, it’s not really to be taken seriously. It can’t happen here.

I’m sorry. Those are all the rationalizations of people who have decided that anti-alarmism is the proper, neutral posture toward Trump. I won’t psychoanalyze them and say why, although I have my theories. I’ll just say that they—and many people like them who package mainstream news for tens of millions of readers and viewers and listeners—have shown us time after time after fatiguing time that they believe that Trump’s outrageous remarks need to be “contextualized” and that we shouldn’t get too worked up over them.

Trump said in 2016 that people at his rallies should beat up protesters. Oh, relax—maybe he was joking. He said there was a Second Amendment solution for Hillary Clinton. Well, that was ambiguous. He clearly and repulsively mocked a journalist with physical disabilities. Well, it wasn’t completely clear what he was referring to. Barack Obama was spying on him. Well, there may be no evidence, but that’s Trump being Trump. And so on, times a thousand.

Question: What will it take? Where is the line that Trump must cross for these people to say to themselves, “OK. That’s enough. We are alarmed, and we believe America should be alarmed, and we are going to cover this like it’s the crisis it is.” If calling for six legislators to be hanged doesn’t clear that bar, what will?

These legislators did nothing wrong. They said, “You can refuse illegal orders … you must refuse illegal orders.” This is correct and true. It is what recruits are taught in every branch of the military. It prevents a president from turning the military into his own personal army, and as such, it’s one of the key principles that keeps a democratic republic from careening into dictatorship.

As to why they felt moved to make this video in the first place—well, we don’t really know the answer to that yet, but you don’t have to be George Patton to know that Trump would like to use the military to do whatever he wants it to do. TNR’s Greg Sargent interviewed one of the six Democrats, Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, for his Daily Blast podcast today. Here’s what she had to say:

Sargent: It sounds to me like all of you who have military or intelligence experience are hearing from inside these institutions that there’s real and actual concern, live concern, that people are being asked to carry out illegal orders. Is that what’s going on?

Houlahan: It’s partially what’s going on. It’s also sort of the buildup of the last nine or ten months, where we have watched this president kind of push on every boundary, try to break every circuit, so to speak, and overload us all with attempts to figure out where the lines are in the law. And so it’s not just in the military realm—though of course that’s what this particular podcast or broadcast is about—but it is abundantly evident with more than 149 instances over the last months of the president putting out orders of one form or another that have then been pushed to the courts in some way, shape, or form.

Houlahan went on to tell Sargent that she had “had a few conversations with people who have indicated discomfort with sort of the current state of affairs” and that “I know my colleagues have had similar kinds of conversations.” I would imagine we’ll be hearing more about this.

The country should be thanking these six for making this public warning, both because it described a very real threat to the Constitution and because, in eliciting a crazed response from Trump, the video showed America a new and even more depraved level of his dangerous ignorance. George Washington, please. Washington is the most anti-Trump leader not only in American history but probably in the history of the modern world.

Washington advocated a certain degree of mercy toward prisoners of war. When he captured more than 900 Hessians at Trenton in 1776, he not only didn’t hang them—he ordered that his troops do them no harm. Instead of being hauled off to prisons, they were sent to farms and allowed to work. And, of course, we all know—or I hope we all know—that Washington directly rebuffed his chance to become America’s dictator in 1783. Trump, as usual, hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about.

But Trump himself is only part of the problem here. The other part is a media that collectively thinks we ought to just shrug these things off as Trump being Trump. Yes; it is Trump being Trump. And that’s precisely the problem. Does someone literally have to die before these “outbursts” merit a banner headline? Or even then, will they counsel us not to be alarmed—to consider the context? These people are going to help contextualize us into dictatorship.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

The key thing about Donald Trump’s presidency, when you examine it alongside the history of every other Oval Office occupant, is that to understand what drives him day-to-day, you have to have a handle on his psychology—all those twisted urges and impulses that twitch through his brain. This is because so much of what he does is by pure instinct—id unchecked by superego; animal urge unmitigated by conscience. That, plus the fact that all he really cares about is how he looks on TV (more specifically, Fox News and Newsmax). Who can doubt that part of what he loves about bombing those boats in the Caribbean is that he loves seeing them go boom on a big screen?

So, when we analyze this administration, we have to look for the psychological “tells” in a way we simply didn’t with any other president, because the other presidents, no matter their politics, weren’t emotional 5-year-olds who lived in an impenetrable image bubble created and maintained by their staffs and their propagandists with press passes. And the psychological tell of the week? Hauling Representative Lauren Boebert into the White House Situation Room to try to break her down and make her change her vote on the Jeffrey Epstein discharge petition.

Think about this purely as a presidential decision. We don’t know whether this was his idea or if an aide hatched this plan and he liked it, but it amounts to the same thing. Yeah, we can picture Trump thinking: the Situation Room; secret, private, all those fancy screens and maps—that’ll intimidate her.

When LBJ had a recalcitrant member of Congress to win over, he invited him up to the Truman Balcony for a bourbon. Trump locked Boebert in the room that’s supposed to be used to monitor military operations. It’s where Barack Obama watched Seal Team Six take out bin Laden. It’s unclear whether Trump was there. One assumes he was. But willing hacks Pam Bondi and Kash Patel showed up. Wait, what? What was their presence meant to imply? Why did the attorney general and the FBI director need to be present on a legislative matter? Was the idea to hint to Boebert that she could face some sort of legal consequences if she didn’t capitulate? On a congressional vote?

Boebert laughed it all off, but she didn’t cave. In fact, the strong-arming apparently left her all the more convinced Trump may be hiding something. Hard to imagine I’d ever be saying this, but: good for her. And for her colleague Nancy Mace, whom Trump simply called, in the old-fashioned way. But both stood their ground, and next week, the House will vote to compel Bondi’s Justice Department to release the files, with possibly up to 100 Republicans voting to do so.

Trump is clearly in a dead panic about this. We saw this week the reason why. Many of the Epstein emails released this week were—at least in the court of public opinion—incriminating to one degree or another; none more so than the one Epstein wrote to an unnamed acquaintance in December 2018, in which he announced: “i am the one able to take him down.” Also: “I know how dirty donald is.” (He was too lazy to hit the shift key, apparently.)

Trump, as always, says it’s all a lie and he did nothing wrong. And a few of the released emails can be read to support this claim. But just stop and think: We are sitting here, in November 2025, in the middle (or the beginning-middle) of a credible investigation into whether the president of the United States engaged in sex acts with underage girls. (And when media allies such as Megyn Kelly publicly try to finesse the differences between having sex with a 5-year-old versus having sex with a 15-year-old, that’s not a good sign.)

There’s still plenty of reason to think we’ll never get a satisfactory answer about Trump’s place in Epstein’s grotesque constellation of decadent elites. Trump still has a number of roadblocks to put in the way of getting to the point of the files being released. First and foremost, there’s the Senate. Because once the House votes to release the files, then the Senate has to. I haven’t seen much handicapping on this yet. But it would have to clear the 60-vote cloture hurdle, meaning that 13 Republicans would have to vote with the Democrats to bring the matter to final passage.

Then, of course, even if it does pass the Senate, Trump can veto it. At that point, two-thirds of each House would be required to override the veto. And even then, if all that happens, there’s still Bondi. She could just say, No, I’m not going to do it. Yes, that would be defying an act of Congress. Do you really have trouble picturing her doing that?

Of course, if this gets to that point, we’ll have a major national scandal on our hands, for one simple reason that will be crystal clear to a comfortable majority of the American people: If Trump and his goons are going to those lengths to keep these files from being made public, then he must obviously have something bad to hide.

That’s what makes this different from every other Trumpian contest of wills. In his battles with Democrats, with woke universities, with liberal law firms, with people he doesn’t like being in America, he’s always had a position that some percentage of Americans found compelling, for whatever reason. That’s why they cheer his bullying and don’t care about his lies.

This, however, is different. He’s not defending anything that could remotely be called a principle, and he’s not slaying any America-hating dragons. He’s just covering up his own potential monstrous crimes. Given the way we’ve already seen this issue divide MAGA land, even some percentage of Trump’s hard-shell base will surely see the difference.

Zohran Mamdani is off to a solid start as mayor-elect. The transition team he named the day after winning has garnered generally positive coverage, from what I’ve seen. It’s anchored by four women, three of whom are City Hall veterans—one comes from the Bill de Blasio administration, while the other two, more intriguingly, served under the very non-Mamdani-like Eric Adams and Mike Bloomberg. The fourth is Lina Khan, who was Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair. She is a hero to liberals and something—well, let’s say—other than that to a lot of capitalist-class types, so her involvement sends a reassuring signal to the base and presumably a healthy little warning shot across the bow of the Good Ship One Percent.

Mamdani will soon have a massive city to run, more than 300,000 employees to manage, and a budget north of $100 billion to execute and carry out. The New York City government is a sprawling Leviathan that’s larger than many state governments—just scroll through this list and have a look-see.

I of course don’t cover all this closely. But I once did, and for a long time, under the mayoralties of Ed Koch (the sunset years), David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg. I never had a desk in City Hall’s Room 9, the cluttered squat where the reporters were based, but I spent a lot of time down there and knew dozens of deputy mayors and commissioners and lower-level appointees, and I think I still know a bit about how it all works. In addition, I still remember a thing or two about how the New York media and its tabloid subculture operate.

And on the basis of that, I can offer this educated conjecture with some confidence: Mamdani’s powerful enemies are lying in wait and surely already setting traps for him. Their biggest weapon won’t be anything having to do with socialism or Israel, the two topics that got the most attention during the campaign. It won’t even be crime, unless somehow crime suddenly spikes up, which seems unlikely.

Rather, it will be corruption and scandal. Why? Is it because Mamdani is on the make? No. It’s just a pitfall of big-city government. And New York is the biggest big-city government in the country, by a mile—a place where corruption and scandal are, or would seem to be and usually have been, inevitable. Mamdani and his people need to know this, and they need to build an administration that is as bulletproof against scandal as possible.

That means appointing people to high positions who are competent and honest. Ideology shouldn’t be a factor here. The head of the Department of Sanitation doesn’t need to know the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism. He or she needs to know how to pick up trash and clear snow—especially in the neighborhoods that went for Andrew Cuomo, because if the streets of Bayside or Midwood sit uncleared for a week after a snowstorm, the media, led of course by the New York Post, will rip him to shreds. It’s not fair, but it’s how it is.

Beyond that somewhat obvious example, there are three agencies in particular where I think Mamdani needs to make appointments (assuming he wants his own people) who’ll really mind the henhouse: the Department of Education; the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA; and the Health and Hospitals Corporation, or HHC.

These are all massive, well, corporations in their own right. The Department of Education, which was placed under mayoral control back when I was covering City Hall, is by far the largest: It has around 150,000 employees and a budget of nearly $40 billion and educates more than one million children. NYCHA has north of 10,000 employees and a budget of more than $5 billion and manages 335 properties that serve more than half a million people. The HHC has around 43,000 employees and a budget of $12 billion and runs 11 public hospitals and 30 community clinics.

In the time I covered New York, I saw scandals bubble up from these agencies and swallow mayors whole, at least for a little while. Ed Koch’s HHC guy faked his diploma and continued to lie about it, even at the press conference he called to set matters straight. David Dinkins’s NYCHA appointee spent an insane amount of money redecorating her office; I seem to recall something about a $3,000 sofa.

As for the Education Department, I’ll never forget the way one former schools chancellor, the capable and incorruptible Rudy Crew, once described his job to me (this is a very close paraphrase): Imagine you’re on one of those moving walkways. Then people start shooting arrows at you. Then the walkway starts moving faster and faster and faster. Then those arrows start coming at you much more rapidly, until they’re coming nonstop. That’s the job.

And he was just describing the job of schools chancellor, not mayor. Mamdani’s moving walkway is going to chug along at a ferocious rate from his first hour in office. And the people who want to see him fail are going to be scouring the three agencies I mentioned and others for any hint of scandal they can unearth.

Mamdani also needs to understand, as I hope and assume he already does, the extent to which the right-wing Post drives the entire New York news cycle and has for years. They can have all the fun they want with hammers and sickles, as they did the day after Mamdani won. That won’t really matter that much. But if they can sink their canines into a juicy scandal—especially one that reveals the socialist to be a “hypocrite,” which the right loves more than anything—he’ll have big trouble.

So he needs to do two things. First, appoint honest, competent, no-bullshit people to run these vast agencies, people who’ll keep an eye out for any signs of corruption. Second, devote a decent chunk of every day to monitoring these agencies himself—grilling the deputy mayors who oversee them, calling the agency heads, making unexpected visits to their facilities, communicating that he won’t tolerate corruption of any kind.

And what if one of these spot inspections reveals corruption? My advice: Bring it into the light. Rather than covering it up or quietly moving a bad actor out of their post, get in front of reporters and tell them what you found and what you did about it. Be forthright and take responsibility—because that’s the sturdy foundation of the new brand of politics you want to build.

If Mamdani can demonstrate that a government of the left can be ruthlessly honest and reasonably efficient, he’ll have proven something important and accomplished something big, even if he never opens a single grocery store.

Saturday is November 1—the day open enrollment begins on the Obamacare exchanges, and thus the day that those 20 million people will start learning in specific terms how much their health care premiums are going to increase. It is also the day that the Trump administration will stop paying SNAP benefits, the nutritional assistance program that helps 42 million Americans buy food for themselves and their families, at an average of around $175 a month. It will do this despite the presence of a $6 billion reserve fund to cover food stamp emergencies, which the administration argued in court Thursday it couldn’t or wouldn’t spend because this is not an emergency. Or the right kind of emergency. Or something.

In addition, it will be the thirty-second day of the current government shutdown (the longest was 35 days, during Donald Trump’s first term). It will also mark 51 days since the House of Representatives, under Speaker Mike Johnson, has cast a vote. And it will be 38 days since the election of Democrat Adelita Grijalva to the Arizona House seat held by her father without her yet being sworn in, a situation about which Johnson, who by law must perform the ceremony, has told lie after pathetic lie. He has kept the House out of session and delayed her swearing in for one reason alone, which everyone knows: She’ll be the 218th vote to release the files relating to Jeffrey Epstein.

So these are Mike Johnson’s Christian values, as Paul Krugman put it on his Substack Tuesday: “It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.”

It’s a 100 percent reasonable interpretation. If Johnson weren’t paralyzed by the looming Epstein vote, which he wouldn’t have the power to block from coming to the floor, the House could be in session, voting, and it could have done something about getting those SNAP benefits to people. In fact, the only factor that makes Krugman’s interpretation an other-than-reasonable one is that Republicans, given their long-standing and ferocious hostility to food stamps and every program that makes poor people’s burden a bit lighter, might not agree to vote for emergency spending. They’ve been trying and sometimes succeeding at making deep cuts to this program for nearly 15 years.

Many people have pointed out that Republicans are harming their own constituents, since many SNAP recipients are rural and white. People point this out as if the Republicans don’t know this, and telling them would make them go, “Oh, heck, we forgot, thank you, we better go change our ways. Praise Jesus.” News flash: They know. They just don’t care.

And their president certainly doesn’t care. Initially, the Department of Agriculture had said that the emergency fund would be tapped in case November 1 came and went without the government reopening. But then the department reversed course. And so the Trump administration was in court Thursday arguing that the reserve fund was there for natural disasters only.

Funny thing—Trump has moved around hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the troops, which is fine, and to pay the masked and unbadged men rounding up many innocent people for deportation, which is very much not fine. He also sent $20 billion to his neofascist pal in Argentina to help him win an election and prop up his regime—a bailout, The New York Times reported, that will personally benefit at least two friends of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But it won’t use money to feed poor people that is just sitting there for that very purpose.

As for the premiums under Obamacare, we’ve seen a few early numbers. November 1 brings a double whammy: the normal yearly increases as the reenrollment period begins, and the end of extra subsidies passed during the pandemic if Congress doesn’t renew them. The New York Times found a woman in Oregon who has been paying $459 a month and who next year will have to start paying $1,059 a month, with a pulverizing deductible of $7,100. Another woman from California was set to see her costs rise from $865 a month to $1,965.

Not that the Republicans care about this in practice either. But in theory, at least, Mike Johnson could hold votes on this matter too. But that would involve calling the House back into session, which would mean—according to his own worthless promises—that he’d have to seat Grijalva, and that’s a nonstarter. He has to protect those people whose names appear in those files—or at least one person’s. After all, who can forget the imperishable New Testament chapter wherein Jesus said to let the poor children go hungry and the undeserving poor take ill and die for the sake of protecting sexual predators?

These people are beyond immoral.

Inevitably in these situations, there’s a lot of talk about which party is “winning” the shutdown. So fine, let’s play that dull game for a bit. I’ll make two points.

First: I do not understand why the Democrats haven’t been shouting about Grijalva nonstop, making sure America knows how many days it’s been since her election, and why this is happening to her. They do it, sort of, in the same way that they do a lot of things, sort of. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego did confront Johnson, once, and say, “Stop covering up for pedophiles.” Johnson said, “That’s ridiculous.” But different Democrats should be making Johnson say that every day.

Second, I suspect maybe the Democrats will give in next week. They hope that outrage about the lack of food stamps and especially the exploding health care subsidies will force the Republicans’ hand, and they might be right about that. But more likely, once actual people start actually suffering, it’s the Democrats who will sue for peace, because Democrats actually give a couple of shits about that, whereas Republicans couldn’t care less, because not caring less is their brand (unless those putting in the suffering time include, say, fossil fuel CEOs).

So maybe the Democrats will do that. But I think even if they do, and the shallow Politico “win the day” verdicts agree that the GOP won, Democrats can still win down the road. They fought for lower health care subsidies. They fought for the federal workforce. They fought for hungry families. They fought for the 812,000 residents of the 7th district of Arizona. OK, they lost, in the short term. But they fought.

Three months from now, when millions of Americans’ health care premiums have shot through the roof and millions of others have given up their coverage because they can no longer afford it, well, the Democrats can come back and show voters that this is what “victory” looks like, according to this alleged new party of the working class.