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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor to The Next Move.

In recent days, Vladimir Putin has intensified his campaign of murder and terror in Ukraine. Also, President Trump has invited Putin to attend the G20 meeting in Florida this coming December.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, “We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage, not just with the president, but with other world leaders. We hope that’s an invitation he’ll accept.”

Putin can “engage” with them whenever he wants—by phone, perhaps. But at a G20 meeting, while his hands are soaked in blood? The old Rubio would have cried bloody murder.

Trump, however, has always wanted Putin to resume his place at international gatherings, without preconditions. As soon as he became president in 2017, he wanted Putin to return to the G7, making it the G8 again.

The United States and other members had suspended Russia from the group after its invasion of Ukraine in 2014. But Trump wanted Russia readmitted, without any change “on the ground”—specifically, Ukrainian ground.

From the G7 summit in 2018, held in Canada, Trump said, “This used to be the G8, not the G7. And something happened a while ago, where Russia is no longer in.” That “something” was Russia’s invasion of a neighbor.

Putin has not been to a G20 meeting since 2019. He attended the one in 2014, held in Australia months after the Russian invasion. He was mingling with other leaders, slapping backs. When he got to the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, he extended his hand. After a second or two, Harper took it, saying, “Well, Vladimir, I’ll shake your hand, but I really have only one thing to say to you, and that is, get out of Ukraine.”

Putin smirked that smirk of his and said, “Well, I’m not in Ukraine.” Harper then said, “That’s why it’s a waste of my time to talk to you.”

(I got this account from Harper in a 2018 podcast.)

What manner of man, what manner of leader, are we inviting to Florida? Here is a news report from a couple of days ago: “Russian missile and drone strikes killed at least four people, including a child, in Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight …”

Another report says, “A Russian drone strike on the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv killed at least two people on Monday.”

There is footage, if you can bear it, of Russian forces dropping bombs on a man walking his dogs.

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It’s important to know some names and faces, lest the dead, the murdered, be mere abstractions. A Ukrainian soldier, Danylo Ivzhenko, posted a tribute to his wife, Maria: “Today, a Russian attack on a business center killed the most important person in my life. … Last year, we took out a mortgage and planned to have a baby this winter.”

In another attack, a 2-year-old boy named Kyrylo was killed. So were his grandmother, both grandfathers, and other relatives. His mother survived, severely wounded.

Russian forces have kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, and now these children, older, are being forced to fight in the Russian army against Ukraine.

Then there is starvation—the deliberate starvation of Ukrainians. One headline reads, “ ‘Hell on earth’: last residents eat weeds to survive in Russian-occupied Oleshky.” Anne Applebaum commented, “Another mass famine, carried out by another cruel regime.”

In 2018, Applebaum published a book about the Holodomor, i.e., the starving of Ukrainians by the Kremlin in the 1930s. (“Holodomor” means, literally, “murder through starvation.”) In his own book—a groundbreaking study in 1987—Robert Conquest used the term “terror-famine.”

Putin’s Russia is aiming to destroy Ukraine thoroughly. The headline over this article reads, “Russian Attacks Destroy Millions of Books, the Heart of Ukrainian Culture.”

This is to say nothing of what Putin’s dictatorship is doing to Russians in Russia. In 2017, I wrote about a political prisoner, incredibly brave, as such prisoners tend to be. He is Yuri Dmitriev, a researcher associated with Memorial, the organization founded by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet-era dissidents. (Memorial shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and needless to say it is now banned in Russia.)

A week ago, Dmitriev was “rushed from Penal Colony No. 18 in Mordovia to a prison medical facility in the village of Barashevo after a suspected stroke,” says this report. The prisoner is now 70.

Vladimir Putin is not a normal head of state or government. Every day, he directs a war of conquest, filled with atrocities. War crime after war crime. Obviously, democratic governments often have to deal with monsters such as Putin in the diplomatic realm. But they do not have to invite these monsters to routine international gatherings.

In 1931, Nancy Astor, the British parliamentarian, met Stalin and had a question for him: “When are you going to stop killing people?” That is the central question, screamingly urgent.

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In the White House, President Trump has what he calls the “Presidential Walk of Fame.” It includes portraits of all the presidents—except one. In the place of Joe Biden, there is an image of an autopen.

Trump and others contend, or pretend, that it was scandalous for Biden to use an autopen. But this is standard practice in political offices.

In 1984, I was an intern for Senator Bob Dole. I was introduced to the autopen. My teenage self was scandalized. It seemed so impure—dishonest. I had a lot to learn …

The White House website—the official, governmental site—says, “AUTOPEN. 46th President. 2021–2025.” The accompanying text begins this way:

“Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.”

Let me ask you: What should future presidents, future White Houses, say about Trump? What should be pictured in the place of Trump himself? How would Republicans like that?

Last Thursday, Trump was hosting Xi Jinping. They paused in front of the “autopen portrait” and had a good laugh together. Proudly, the White House tweeted this moment around.

Who is Xi Jinping? He is the boss of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP imprisons, tortures, and kills some of the best people in China—democrats striving for basic freedoms. The CCP is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. (This was the determination of the US State Department in 2021.) The CCP has crushed Tibet and threatens to do the same to Taiwan.

This government, the Chinese government, is a mortal enemy of the United States and all free countries.

If you think that what Trump did with Xi in the White House is wrong, you do not suffer from “TDS”—“Trump Derangement Syndrome”—as many will tell you (as they do me regularly). You are just a decent American.

I think back to an episode in 2019. Biden was launching his campaign for president. He referred to Kim Jong-un as a “dictator” and a “tyrant.” That is the least of what he is. Kim presides over one of the most monstrous regimes ever conceived by man.

Trump has always been chummy with him, even lovey-dovey. If you would like the nauseating details, consult a piece of mine published in October 2020: “Trump and Dictators.”

Kim responded to Biden, calling him a “fool of low IQ” and an “imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being.” Trump tweeted his approval:

“I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me [regarding nuclear weapons], & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?”

Among other things, note the respectful “Chairman Kim” versus “Swampman Joe Biden.”

Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, now the governor of Arkansas, was asked about this—Trump’s chortling with Kim over Biden’s IQ, etc. She said, simply, “I think they agree in their assessment of former vice president Joe Biden.”

Again: Is it right for US presidents to joke with Communist dictators about other American leaders? Does that sit well with you? Who has the TDS? Those who object or those who think it’s swell, when Trump does it?

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In 2006, Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, traveled to New York to address the United Nations. In that address, he said, “The devil came here yesterday”—meaning the American president, George W. Bush.

Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York was a left-wing Democrat and a fierce critic of Bush. But listen to what he said:

“George Bush is the president of the United States and represents the entire country. Any demeaning public attack against him is viewed by Republicans and Democrats, and all Americans, as an attack on all of us.”

And listen to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House:

“Hugo Chávez abused the privilege that he had of speaking at the UN. In doing so, in the manner in which he characterized the president, he demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela. Hugo Chávez fancies himself a modern-day Simón Bolívar, but all he is is an everyday thug.”

An everyday thug—exactly.

Can Republicans rise to the level of Rangel and Pelosi? They should be ashamed not to.

When I wrote about the 2019 episode concerning Kim, Trump, and Biden, I received a letter from a student—the president of his College Republicans club. He said that he had read my articles about North Korea and its horrors. My interviews with escapees and defectors.

Some of his fellow club members, he said, were going along with Trump on the loveliness, or admirability, of “Chairman Kim.” “But I want you to know that some of us are still holding the line and fighting the good fight.”

This student ended his letter as follows: “Though you are not a Republican anymore, I figured you would take a little encouragement in knowing that there are some Young Republicans trying to hold the line, despite the pressure to capitulate.”

To resist the pressure to capitulate: a hard thing and a great thing.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor to The Next Move.

Gulchehra Hoja has had a rough couple of months. On August 3, her brother died. (He was her only sibling.) On September 3, her father died. They were in faraway Ürümqi, the capital of East Turkestan, in northwestern China.

They were Uyghurs. Gulchehra is a Uyghur-American journalist, who worked for Radio Free Asia for 25 years. Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator, is in America this week. Gulchehra hopes that we will spare a thought for the Uyghurs.

Radio Free Asia was established in 1996, and its Uyghur service two years later. RFA, along with other such broadcasters, was shut down last year. It has resumed broadcasting, however, though in rump, shoestring fashion.

For all these years, RFA has provided the only independent news service in the Uyghur language. In the last decade, this service has been especially important, as the Chinese government has unleashed ferocious persecution on the Uyghur people.

It was RFA’s reporting that led the State Department, in 2021, to designate this persecution a genocide.

Gulchehra Hoja is an old friend of mine, and I will refer to her as “Gul,” the name she goes by. Anything else would seem too stiff or formal to me. I wrote about Gul’s life in 2021, here. Today, I will offer a brief sketch.

She was born in 1973, in Ürümqi. Her father, Abduqeyum Hoja, was a well-known archaeologist and author. Her mother, Qimangul Zikri, was a pharmacist and professor of pharmacology. Her brother, Kaisar, came a year and a half after Gul herself.

Her plan was to become a teacher, but she went into television instead—and was very successful at it. She created and hosted children’s programs, in both Uyghur and Chinese. She was rather famous.

In 2001, she took a fateful trip to Europe. There are many sights to see on that continent, but Gul spent a lot of time on the Internet. This was impossible back home. And she learned things: about the Uyghur diaspora, about Chinese propaganda. Also, she discovered the existence of Radio Free Asia.

Bowing to conscience, she offered her services to RFA.

Once in America, she placed a call to Ürümqi. She told her father where she was and why. There was a long pause—10 or 15 seconds. Finally, her father said, “Oh, my brave daughter.”

Then it started—the targeting of Gul’s family and friends by the Chinese government. Her parents were forced to retire. They were essentially under house arrest. Kaisar had been set to marry, but that went up in smoke. The authorities put pressure on the young woman’s family.

This has always pained Gul, as many things have.

In January 2018, she published an interview with a survivor of the gulag: Omurbek Eli. By “gulag,” I mean the concentration camps set up by the Chinese government to confine and brutalize the Uyghurs. Gul’s was the first interview with a survivor ever to appear in the media.

Three days later, the authorities rounded up 25 of Gul’s relatives—a full 25. Some of them, she had never met, as they were born after her defection.

Her mother was imprisoned for about two months. Her father would have been in prison, but he was in the hospital, having suffered a stroke.

In prison, in the camps, Gul’s mother saw and experienced horrible things. The food, such as it was, was so wretched, she did not want to eat it. But she did. She later told her daughter, “I did it for you. I had to survive, because I did not want you to blame yourself for my death.”

Gul’s brother, Kaisar, was arrested several times and imprisoned for three and a half years.

Traditionally, a Uyghur daughter takes care of her elderly parents. This, Gul very much wanted to do. But the responsibility fell to her brother, who never married. This weighed on Gul, heavily. He would reassure her: “You are doing important work. We’re all proud of you.”

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In 2019, Gul won a Magnitsky Human Rights Award. The Chinese government labeled her a “terrorist” and put her on its Most Wanted list—where she remains.

Routinely, the Chinese government has retaliated against the families of RFA journalists. We can only try to imagine the guilt and agony that comes with this.

Shortly after President Trump was sworn in last year, his administration set about abolishing the country’s foreign broadcasting services: RFA, the Voice of America, etc. Dictatorships could hardly believe their luck.

I wrote about this in a piece titled “Radios and Lifelines.”

An editorial in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party organ, said, “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”

A former editor-in-chief of GT, Hu Xijin, put out a statement of his own: “Voice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!”

RFA ceased operating in October of last year. Many could not help noting an irony: For 30 years, the Chinese dictatorship had tried to block and jam RFA. Now the US government was accomplishing the task.

This year, RFA has resumed operations, though in “rump, shoestring fashion,” as I have said. The agency has a handful of contractors, who report stories. These are valuable stories nonetheless.

In this article, Shöhret Hoshur reports that Uyghur children are being forced out of school and into manual labor. In this article, Tahir Izgil tells us about a Uyghur family, arrested for sending food and the like to a relative in Turkey.

Gulchehra Hoja is contributing stories here and there—to Reporters Without Borders, for example. She is working while mourning. Her father had been bedridden for 11 years, looked after by her mother and brother. Her brother was 51 and had been in good health. He was found dead, shocking and puzzling the family.

Gul and her mother have their doubts about how natural Kaisar’s death was. Can anyone fault them for that? I think of an expression from Garry Kasparov: “I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in the KGB.”

(Kasparov, the chess champion and Russian dissident, is the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and its publication, which you are reading: The Next Move.)

“My father was so hopeful that he would see me again one day,” says Gul. Her brother was hopeful too. In fact, “he was the most optimistic person I knew.” Gul’s mother is left, and she will turn 80 this year. It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: Gul longs to see her mother, embrace her, take care of her.

My friend is not giving up hope. “Even in the camps,” says Gul, “my mother and my brother did not give up hope, so why should I?”

Through tears, though in defiant tones, Gul says, “The Chinese government thought they could intimidate me into silence. But I am still speaking.” She further says, “Freedom begins when we refuse to be silenced.” A person has to fight through the fear.

On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted the following: “I met President Xi at the plane (Airport!) yesterday and he looks strong, vibrant, and fit - Better than ever. Madam Xi, of course, BEAUTIFUL!”

How are the Uyghurs in the gulag looking? How about the Chinese political prisoners?

Trump and Xi, says Gulchehra Hoja, are “the two most powerful people in the world.” They are in a position to do much good. “The Creator gave them this chance, and He is watching how they will use it!”

Gul is grateful to have the chance “to tell the truth, to live with dignity, to be a real human being.” Where does the real power lie? “We will see in the end,” says Gul, “and I am hopeful.”

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President Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and all hell broke loose. I remember it well. I was a freshman in college, alive to the drama of the world.

Reagan was speaking in March 1983 to the National Association of Evangelicals. He said we should beware treating the United States and the Soviet Union as moral equals. We should resist the temptation to regard the arms race as a “giant misunderstanding.” We should remember “the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.”

Many, many were aghast. Henry Steele Commager, the famed historian, said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.” Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, in his column about the speech, said, “Primitive: that is the only word for it.”

Further, he said that Reagan had “applied a black-and-white standard to something that is much more complex.” (We will return to those colors, black and white, in due course.)

In his 1990 autobiography, Reagan addressed the controversy. His critics thought that the speech showed him to be “a rhetorical hip-shooter who was recklessly and unconsciously provoking the Soviets into war,” he said. But he made the speech, and others like it, “with malice aforethought.” (That is a typical Reagan touch—funny, sly.) “I wanted to remind the Soviets we knew what they were up to.”

Many found the speech refreshing, even cleansing. I call on Natan Sharansky, who, some 20 years later, gave this testimony:

“In 1983, I was confined to an 8-by-10-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.’”

How was the speech received in the Gulag?

“We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the Free World had spoken the truth—a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.”

Years ago, a friend told me about meeting a Polish businessman, shortly after the end of the Cold War. Making conversation, my friend praised John Paul II, the Polish pope. “He was a hero of the Cold War,” he said. But the Pole wanted to talk about Reagan.

He said he used to listen to the Voice of America in the middle of the night on a transistor radio. The radio was hidden in his house, unknown even to his family. When they were asleep, he would go into a room with no windows. He would put a towel underneath the door and an earpiece in his ear. And then listen.

One night, he heard about Reagan’s “evil empire” speech. And he knew the Cold War was over, and that the Americans had won. It was only a matter of time.

Mere truth-telling, and not so mere, can have a potent effect in a dark struggle. A little moral clarity can go a long way.

For years now, Putin’s Russia has unleashed evil on Ukraine: mass murder, mass torture, mass kidnapping. The depredations of Russian forces in Ukraine have been far worse than those of their Soviet predecessors in Hungary, say, or Czechoslovakia.

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Last month, an article from National Public Radio quoted Robert Hamilton, a professor of international relations who spent 30 years in our military: “War crimes are part of Russia’s strategy in Ukraine, retired US Army colonel says.”

A week ago, Anne Applebaum, the historian, wrote, “People are now dying of hunger in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Another mass famine, carried out by another cruel regime.”

In 2018, Applebaum published a book about the “terror-famine,” or “Holodomor,” committed by the Soviets against Ukraine in the early 1930s: Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.

Ten days ago, Alexander Dugin, the Russian ideologue often known as “Putin’s brain,” weighed in by saying, “The end of war in Ukraine can mean only the end of Ukraine. Nothing less.” Genocidal language, and intent, have been normalized.

Who will call it evil? Anyone?

Last Monday, a news report carried the following headline: “Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel fuel, citing a global shortage.” If you wait to hear our president call on Russia to stop murdering civilians in Ukraine—men, women, and children—you will wait a very long time.

Recall those colors, black and white. Garry Kasparov spoke about them in April 2022, weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion. For 20 years, he was world chess champion. He was also a Russian dissident. Today, he is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

I will quote from his remarks, made those four and a half years ago:

“When I retired from chess in 2005 to form the anti-Putin opposition, many said, ‘Garry, this is not chess! Politics is not black and white!’ Putin’s war on Ukraine is not chess, it’s true. But it is black and white, good versus evil.”

Kasparov also said, “You cannot look at the images from Ukraine in recent weeks and say there is no pure evil.” And: “Meeting evil halfway is still a victory for evil. Evil tempts us with our weakness, with our desire for comfort.”

Things are not supposed to be black and white. They are supposed to be gray, nuanced, multilayered—complex. But it is not always so. I will now call on David Petraeus, the retired Army general and former CIA director.

In April 2023, he said that the Ukraine war is “about as clear a right-versus-wrong as we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

You may not think that the United States ought to help the Ukrainians, as they try to fight off this evil, although I hope you do. But, again, I cite President Reagan, this time speaking in July 1987 at the Ukrainian National Catholic Shrine in Washington, D.C.:

“Our global commitment to freedom does not mandate the sending of arms or troops, but at the very least it means that any people whose liberty is denied or whose independence is violated—that these people know we Americans are on their side.”

Do the Ukrainians know that we are on their side? I doubt they do. Moreover—are we?

President Trump is not shy about accusing a government of genocide. Repeatedly, he has made this accusation against the government of South Africa. He did so with the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, sitting next to him in the Oval Office. Trump claims that the South African government is committing genocide against its white citizens.

He is not shy about using the word “evil.” When Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement from Congress, Trump was asked what he thought. He began his answer by saying, “I think she’s an evil woman.”

Elon Musk used that same word in the early days of the second Trump administration, when he was a senior adviser to the president. Speaking about the National Endowment for Democracy, founded at the instigation of President Reagan, he said, “That evil organization needs to be dissolved.”

America needs its head screwed on right. We need the kind of leadership that clears away the fog of obfuscation, moral idiocy, and lies.

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We should not let Hong Kong fade away. We should not let Joshua Wong fade away. Or Jimmy Lai, or others. Let me elaborate.

For a few years—2019 and 2020 in particular—the eyes of the world were on Hong Kong. It was probably the chief battleground in the perpetual war between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship.

The Chinese Communist Party was determined to make Hong Kong a city like any other in China—unfree, totalitarian. Millions of Hong Kongers were determined to keep the freedom they had enjoyed. The CCP has won, at least for now.

As Perry Link, the eminent scholar of China, remarked to me, we saw a great city “murdered before our eyes.” When I was in my 20s, I saw great cities liberated: Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw … To see a reversal was jarring and painful.

Jimmy Lai is probably the best-known political prisoner in Hong Kong. The 78-year-old businessman and democracy champion has been in prison since December 2020. (For a piece of mine about him, published in 2023, go here.)

Also well-known is Joshua Wong, age 29. He has been in prison for a month longer than Jimmy Lai.

Both of them would be quick to tell you that there are other political prisoners, less well-known, who deserve all the admiration and help we can muster.

Joshua Wong, as the BBC put it, is “the poster child for political activism in Hong Kong.” In October 2014, when he was 18, he was on the cover of Time magazine: “The Face of Protest.” The cover also said, “Teenager Joshua Wong and the youth of Hong Kong are standing up for democracy. Can they win?”

It transpired that they could not—although, as I alluded to above, we are entitled to take a longer view.

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Wong was due to be released in January 2027, after six years and two months, but he has now been charged again and faces another sentence—which could be life.

He was charged with encouraging Western governments to impose sanctions on human-rights abusers in Hong Kong and back the city’s democracy movement. In court, Wong did not dispute the charge. He pleaded guilty.

In Hong Kong’s justice system, such as it is, you have a chance at a more lenient, or less draconian, sentence if you plead guilty.

About 40 of Wong’s supporters were present in the courtroom, and some called out, “Hang in there, Joshua!”

The details of his short but eventful life can be found elsewhere, and I will confine myself to a few basic facts. He was born on October 13, 1996, to a Christian family that followed the Lutheran tradition. He went to the United Christian College (Kowloon East) and then the Open University of Hong Kong.

In May 2011, when he was just 14, he co-founded a group called Scholarism, which opposed attempts by Beijing to inject propaganda into Hong Kong curricula. In April 2016, he co-founded a political party, Demosistō, whose name was a blend of Greek and Latin, conveying the idea of standing up for democracy.

One of his co-founders was Nathan Law, who was able to leave Hong Kong in the summer of 2020, as night fell on the city. On June 30 of that year, the National Security Law went into effect. This law, in sum, bans opposition to the government. Nathan Law found asylum in Great Britain.

(Last month, The Next Move’s Linda Chavez podcasted with Law, here. I podcasted with him myself back in 2021, and subsequently wrote a piece about him and the fate of Hong Kong. For those items, go here and here.)

Joshua Wong was at the forefront of democracy protests in Hong Kong for the better part of a decade. He was in and out of prison. Upon being sentenced in 2017, he said, “You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds! We want democracy in Hong Kong. And we will not give up.”

The United States has not covered itself in glory in this matter. As time was running out, in that summer of 2020, Wong requested asylum of the United States but was denied. This, according to a 2023 book by the journalists Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin: Among the Braves. (For an article on this subject, published by Radio Free Asia, go here.)

In the summer of 2019, as Hong Kongers were massing in the streets, a reporter asked President Trump, “Are you concerned by reports that the Chinese army may be preparing to intervene in Hong Kong against the demonstrators?” Trump said:

“Well, something is probably happening with Hong Kong, because, when you look at, you know, what’s going on, they’ve had riots for a long period of time. And I don’t know what China’s attitude is. Somebody said that at some point they’re going to want to stop that.”

The word “riots,” used by the president of the United States, was particularly unfortunate. That was the CCP’s word for these democratic protests. And the penalty for rioting in Hong Kong is severe.

Trump went on to say about the situation, “That’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”

In November 2019, the president said, “Look, we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy.”

“President Xi,” the “incredible guy,” is, of course, Xi Jinping, the boss of the CCP. How you can stand with Hong Kong and stand with its persecutor at the same time is something I must leave to others to discern.

I can tell you about Joshua Wong, however. In fact, I will give the floor to Yaqiu Wang, a Chinese democracy activist in exile here in the United States:

“Joshua Wong represents precisely the kind of young citizen any society should value: intelligent, principled, and politically engaged. Instead of celebrating those qualities, the authorities have turned them into grounds for persecution. By potentially imprisoning him for life, Beijing also wants Hong Kongers to forget Joshua Wong—a young man who came to symbolize the energy, courage, and political awakening of an entire generation.”

There is a “but” coming, from Yaqiu Wang.

“But keeping him behind bars will not erase him. It will only make him an even more powerful symbol. The CCP and its henchmen in Hong Kong may be able to suppress the Hong Kong people’s desire for freedom and democracy, but they cannot extinguish it. Severe repression only drives those aspirations underground and makes them return with greater force.”

Perry Link, the scholar, is inclined to agree. He cites what he calls a “Chinese idiom”: “The bird that sticks its neck out takes the bullet.” Joshua Wong—like Jimmy Lai and many others—has stuck his neck out. “He has paid a price and is still paying it,” says Professor Link. “Is time on his side?”

The professor answers the question he has posed as follows:

“In the long run, I believe that it is, because the impulse to act morally is indeed rooted in human nature. There are victories and defeats along the way, but no oppressive authority can finally kill that impulse. I think Martin Luther King was right to say that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Joshua’s choice was not wrong.”

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Péter Szijjártó has a new job. He held his former job for 12 years—2014 to 2026. Szijjártó was the foreign minister of Hungary under Viktor Orbán. Now he’s working for BYD, the Chinese automaker.

The US Department of Defense classifies BYD as a Chinese military company, and thereby bars it from getting US defense contracts. The US-based China Labor Watch says that BYD is guilty of using forced labor. In other words, BYD is a classic company of the Chinese Communist Party.

Szijjártó says that he will be “the executive responsible for the group’s external relations and the development of new business lines.” He is not exactly new to BYD, as the Associated Press makes clear:

“While serving in government, Szijjártó was instrumental in securing foreign investments in Hungary from Chinese companies, including his now-employer BYD, which received considerable state subsidies during his tenure.”

BYD opened its first European factory in Hungary and established its European headquarters there.

Péter Magyar, Orbán’s successor as prime minister, gibed, “The only difference from before is that, from now on, Péter Szijjártó will no longer be paid by the Hungarian people for the same ‘work,’ but by his actual employer.”

Szijjártó is not the first official from an EU country to go to work for a tyranny. Gerhard Schroeder went to work for Putin—that is, he signed on with several giant Russian companies. Schroeder had been chancellor of Germany, a Social Democrat.

Karin Kneissl, too, went to work for Putin. She had been foreign minister of Austria, in a populist-Right government. She has lived in Russia since 2023.

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The case of Hungary is especially important to some of us. Viktor Orbán’s government was a darling of the Republican Party and the broader American Right. Old friends of mine made trips to Hungary—political pilgrimages—and a few of them actually moved there, working for Orbán either directly or indirectly.

Mitch McConnell is one of the few Republicans who never fell for Orbán. In 2024, when he was the GOP leader in the Senate, he said, “Hungary’s leaders have cozied up to America’s greatest strategic adversaries”—Russia, China, and Iran. Leaving Iran aside in this article, I will touch on Russia and China.

Orbán’s Hungary was Putin’s closest ally in Europe, if you don’t count Belarus and its dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who is a junior Putin.

In late 2021, as Russian troops were massing on the Ukrainian border, Foreign Minister Szijjártó received the Order of Friendship from the Kremlin. He earned it, too.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Szijjártó went to Russia 16 times. The first was in July 2022, when Szijjártó went to Moscow to ensure that Russian gas kept flowing to Hungary.

For years, Szijjártó and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, were downright chummy. On March 1, 2024, Szijjártó posted a video to Facebook, showing the two foreign ministers laughing it up. This was especially egregious to some of us, as it was the day of Alexei Navalny’s funeral.

Navalny had been the leader of the Russian opposition, killed in prison.

About three months later, Szijjártó traveled to Belarus. A headline from the AP tells the tale: “Hungary’s Foreign Minister Visits Belarus Despite EU Sanctions, Talks About Expanding Ties.” (For the article, go here.)

Five months after that, Szijjártó again traveled to Belarus, this time for a security conference—a rival to the Munich Security Conference, which is essentially for democracies. The conference in Minsk featured Lavrov and the foreign minister of Bashar Assad’s Syria, in addition to the Hungarian.

Earlier this year, transcripts of phone calls between Budapest and Moscow were leaked. Said Szijjártó to Lavrov, “I’m always at your service.” Said Orbán to Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

Putin’s Russia is a murdering, invading machine, and a sworn enemy of the Free West. China is another such enemy, a one-party dictatorship with a gulag, a dictatorship that has crushed Hong Kong, that is threatening Taiwan—that is committing genocide against the Uyghurs.

Xi Jinping, the CCP boss, went to Budapest in May 2024. In welcome, Orbán said, “China is one of the pillars of the new world order.” The two governments announced what they called “an all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership for the new era.”

In Washington, Senator McConnell was scathing. “Viktor Orbán’s government,” he said, “has given Beijing sweeping law-enforcement authority to hunt dissidents on Hungarian soil.”

How can such a thing be countenanced? Applauded?

In September 2025, Beijing staged a big military parade. Putin was in attendance, and so was Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator. So were two officials from the European Union, and only two: Robert Fico, the Putin-friendly prime minister of Slovakia, and Péter Szijjártó.

Five months later, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, was in Budapest, talking with Szijjártó. Wang’s office put out a statement: “China appreciates Hungary’s friendly policy toward China.” Today, Szijjártó is employed by a Chinese military company.

Allow me to close with a personal note. For many years (27), I was employed by National Review, the magazine founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., my beloved friend and favorite writer. He died in 2008, at 82.

In 2016, our magazine did a Danube cruise, which had us docked in Budapest. Onboard came Foreign Minister Szijjártó, to speak. I made myself scarce, opting for a walk around town. This was just a private protest—not even a protest but an instinct. The Orbán government had already started to smell, at least according to my nose.

But I don’t think any of us could imagine that Szijjártó would receive the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship. Or be “always” at Lavrov’s “service.” Or be working for the Chinese.

This has been a strange, terrible trip.

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President Trump, his administration, and his Republican Party have not been blasting Russia and China. Those are monstrous, murderous dictatorships (and sworn enemies of the United States). No, they have been blasting Canada.

The United States has been fortunate in many ways. We have certainly been fortunate in having Canada as a neighbor. How many countries get so friendly, so like-minded, a neighbor, no matter our occasional disagreements?

Remember this extraordinary fact: the border between our countries is the longest undefended border in the world.

Nevertheless, Trump & Co. have cast Canada as a villain. They say that Canada has taken advantage of us, swindled us, done us dirty. In the minds of the new Republicans—the post-2016 Republicans—America is perpetually a victim, a “pitiful, helpless giant” (to borrow Nixon’s phrase).

What’s more, Trump & Co. have repeatedly threatened to annex Canada. “The 51st state,” they call it.

Are they just joking? “Trolling”? If so, is that the way the US government—any serious government—should conduct itself?

On Tuesday, the White House put out this charming meme:

Here we have an eagle, mauling a goose—a Canada goose. Get it? Pretty cool, huh?

Then there is this:

Our president is big in the renaming business. (Think “Gulf of America,” as opposed to the somehow intolerable “Gulf of Mexico.”) Trump doesn’t consult anyone—that would be prissy process stuff. He is the type who decrees.

Here is another example of the president’s handiwork:

If you regard this as childish, some will claim that you have “TDS,” i.e., “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In all likelihood, you simply have a mature idea of what a president of the United States, and his country, ought to be.

Turn, now, to the vice president, JD Vance, who earlier this week told an audience, “Canada is a state. Sorry. Freudian slip. That was actually an accident.” Was it?

The first month of 2025 seems a long time ago, but think back to it. On January 30, 10 days after the second Trump administration began, Kristi Noem, who was then our secretary of homeland security, traveled to the Northeast. She visited the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the US–Canadian border.

On one side is Derby Line, Vermont; on the other is Rock Island, Quebec. The Haskell family built the structure on the border because they wanted Americans and Canadians to have equal access.

Throughout the building, there is a black line, indicating the border. On her visit, Secretary Noem hopped from one side to the other. “USA No. 1,” she said on the American side. “The 51st state,” she said on the other. She did this over and over.

In a piece published a few months later, I asked, “Was this patriotism? If you’re really number one, do you have to thump your chest about it? Do you have to belittle someone else? How should a great and good country behave?”

Long ago, I learned a point from William F. Buckley Jr., the late and great writer. It went something like this: “There are Americans who fail to grasp that other people, too, have patriotism. That others, too, have a sense of national pride, of national dignity.”

You have heard about the “Ugly American”—the lout, ignoramus, and jingoist who crashes his way around the world. I have always kicked against this stereotype. Argued against it. Resented it. Have our president and vice president made it true? I’m afraid they have—that they, indeed, typify it.

Days after Donald Trump was sworn in for the first time, in January 2017, I had occasion to write a post titled “Mexico and Us.” “The United States is the top dog—the top dog in all the world,” I said. “Diminished, yes, but still top.”

And “in dealing with such countries as Mexico—very far from the top—we can afford to be large-minded, generous, considerate.”

In diplomacy, this costs you nothing, and gains you a lot.

“A nation, a people, must be allowed its self-respect,” I went on. “Its dignity. A nation, when it is little, must not be made to feel like a lackey or a wretch—or to be made to pay.”

You may remember that one of Donald Trump’s selling points in the 2016 presidential campaign was that he would build a wall along our southern border, and make Mexico pay for this wall.

Whatever became of that wall, by the way (never mind the funding for it)?

Bill Buckley had experience everywhere, but he had a great deal of experience in Latin America. He had lived there, and spoke Spanish. He knew the keen sensitivity in Latin America about the yanqui colossus. He had a sense of where and how the United States should tread, when it came to our southern neighbors.

Buckley was one of the relatively few conservatives who supported President Carter’s Panama Canal treaties. (George F. Will was another one.) In 1978, Buckley had a famous debate with his friend Ronald Reagan on the subject.

In that post of mine in January 2017, I wrote, “I think my 14-year-old self was on Reagan’s side. But you couldn’t deny that Buckley made some good points.”

Yes. See whether you agree:

“I hope that Governor Reagan will not tell us tonight that Panamanian pride is not involved in the matter of the treaties. He may tell us that Panamanian pride must, in this case, be subordinated to our national interest. And if he convinces me that the national interest requires the subordination of Panamanian pride, I shall side with him.”

There is, of course, a “but” coming.

“But he must not tell me that pride does not count.” And “he ought not to suggest that American pride is one thing and Panamanian pride quite something else.”

With apologies to Bill (Buckley), maybe I could leave the final words to Calvin Coolidge. That president was known as “Silent Cal,” but when he spoke, he truly had something to say.

On October 6, 1925, Coolidge delivered a speech in Omaha, Nebraska. Its title: “Toleration and Liberalism.” (This meant what sometimes goes by “classical liberalism,” of which Coolidge was a representative.)

“The generally expressed desire of ‘America first’ cannot be criticized,” said the president. “It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first.”

This “cannot be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness. Hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions will not be productive of any benefits in this direction.”

No, “we can make little contribution to the welfare of humanity on the theory that we are a superior people and all others are an inferior people. We do not need to be too loud in the assertion of our own righteousness.”

A final sentence from that president, 101 years ago:

“We can only make America first in the true sense which that means by cultivating a spirit of friendship and good will, by the exercise of the virtues of patience and forbearance, by being ‘plenteous in mercy,’ and through progress at home and helpfulness abroad standing as an example of real service to humanity.”

That was a different kind of Republicanism, a different kind of Americanism. We can have it again—if we want (and only if we want). “A nation is a daily plebiscite,” said Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French scholar. May we soon hear and heed the better angels of our nature.

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For Alexander Malofeev, the Russian pianist, age 24, I have a possibly strange question: “Do you feel young?” We older people consider him young, of course, but I know this: when I was 24, I did not feel young.

So, does he? His answer is yes and no.

No, because he has been concertizing since he was about 11. You start to think in terms of music seasons, he says, not in terms of calendar years. He has been working for about 15 years now. You might even call him a veteran.

But at the end of 2022, he left Russia—which gave him a new lease on life, or a different kind of life. He now lives in Berlin. He feels a new freedom, a wider latitude. So, in a sense, he is just a few years old.

The question “Do you feel young?” is not a straightforward one for Sasha Malofeev. (“Sasha” is the common nickname for “Alexander,” and that is what Malofeev goes by.)

I have sat down with him at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria, where he is playing a recital and I am doing some journalistic work. To hear our interview—our podcast—go here.

Malofeev was born in Moscow on October 21, 2001. (For an American like me, that means about a month after 9/11.) There was a piano at home—an upright. A piano is standard equipment in Russian homes, certainly in Muscovite ones.

“My grandpa studied music,” says Malofeev. “My grandma studied music. My dad studied music. None of them can play. But we had this piece of furniture, and when I was five, we unwrapped it, so that I could try it out.”

He was good at it.

Sasha was educated at the leading musical institutions in Moscow: the Gnessin School, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. When he was 13, he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians. The age limit for that competition is 17.

In brief, Malofeev has played everywhere, and with everyone, meaning the premier orchestras and conductors. He has a contract with Sony Classical. He’s on top of the musical, or at least the pianistic, heap.

A question for him: “Did you choose this?” He answers that no one chooses anything at five years old. He was given a regimen, and he accepted it. “You wake up. You go to the piano.” There was never any choice—until he moved out of Russia when he was 21. That was his choice.

I tell him, “I want to use the expression ‘declaration of independence.’” He laughs and says, “Yeah, maybe.”

Another question, offbeat: Does he feel that he can be goofy, serious artist though he is? The rest of us can be goofy, especially when we’re young. It’s normal and expected.

There is no goofing off in the Russian musical system, says Malofeev. It’s work and sacrifice. It’s well-nigh military. “I had very limited social experience and very few chances to be goofy, or to get to know what that is.” Now he is “trying to find more balance.”

I have skipped too far ahead in our story, or rather his story.

In February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the West, some presenting organizations canceled appearances by Russian musicians. These musicians included hard-core Putinists. They also included at least one innocent bystander: 20-year-old Sasha Malofeev.

On March 2, he made a statement, on Facebook: “The truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence or predict.”

Five days later, he made another statement: “Honestly, the only thing I can do now is pray and cry.” He was reluctant to say anything—anything further—that might affect his family in Russia. (That tells you something about the Russian government, doesn’t it?)

Winding up, he said, “I do understand that my problems are very insignificant compared to those of people in Ukraine, including my relatives who live there.”

I commented, “What a mensch, that young man.” I made that comment in an essay that says all I know to say on the question of cancellations, boycotts, and the like: “When Politics Invades Art.”

Malofeev may be out of Russia, but Russian he is. The Russian language is “the air I breathe,” he says. So is Russian music. And the two are related, he says: the language and the music.

If Malofeev has a hero, or model, it’s Rachmaninoff—who, I might add, left Russia in 1917, about a month after the revolution, and died in Beverly Hills in 1943.

Malofeev and I spend some time on Vladimir Horowitz, another pianist who idolized Rachmaninoff (as any sensible pianist, or person, would). Horowitz left Russia in 1925—a bit late—and died in New York in 1989.

Horowitz came from the “Russian school,” for sure—exemplified it—but he also absorbed influences from all over the world, in a high-flying international career.

Life experiences find their way into musicianship, says Malofeev. He notes that most of the people in his audiences are much older than he (obviously). They bring a wealth of experience to their listening to music. And what does he, the pianist, bring?

“I’ve spent my whole life practicing in a room and basically stewing in my own juice.”

To this, I have two reactions. (1) How in the world did this young Russian learn the expression “to stew in one’s own juice”? He grins. He likes English, and he’s adept in it. (2) He has experienced, emotionally, maybe more than he knows.

These days, he feels free to explore repertoire off the beaten path. He is playing Medtner (a composer whom Horowitz also prized). He is playing Mieczysław Weinberg, a Polish-born Jew who went to the Soviet Union in 1939 (five days after Germany invaded Poland). He is playing Arthur-Vincent Lourié, who has an amazing story.

This man, né Naum Izrailevich Lurya, was born in Russia in 1892, and he died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1966, having many adventures and misadventures in between. He worked for the Voice of America.

In his Salzburg recital, Malofeev plays some Lourié pieces. And some Sibelius pieces, essentially unknown. And, at the end, a very well-known piece: Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in B-flat minor.

My article today is not one for music criticism, but I can tell you that Malofeev’s playing of the sonata deserves the highest possible praise, namely the adjective “Rachmaninoff-like.”

Earlier this year, Sony Classical released an album by Malofeev called Forgotten Melodies. That is also the title of a set of piano pieces by Medtner. The composers represented on the album are, in chronological order: Glinka, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, and Medtner. All four of them were born in Russia, and all four of them died in exile (in Berlin, Paris, Beverly Hills, and London, respectively).

Talking with Sasha, I tick off the Russian- or Soviet-born pianists I can think of who live in the West: Grigory Sokolov, Evgeny Kissin, Arcadi Volodos, Yefim Bronfman, Igor Levit, Daniil Trifonov—and now Malofeev. There are others.

Rachmaninoff was 69 when he died, and Malofeev will be that age in 2070. What will Russia be then? No one can know, but we can all hope for the best.

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Earlier this month, President Donald Trump made an incredible claim—literally incredible, as in impossible to believe. He said he had won his 43rd golf championship. All of these “championships” have been “won” at clubs owned by the “victor,” Trump.

In the most recent case, Trump said he had won the senior championship at Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, New Jersey. He announced his achievement in his trademark fashion:

“I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things. It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t!”

A score of 70 would be two under par. That is, again, incredible. As Rick Reilly commented, “No 80-year-old on earth with a pancake swing and the chip yips has ever shot TEN SHOTS under his age.”

Reilly is a veteran golf writer who in 2019 published a book about Trump and golf: Commander in Cheat.

You thought a 70 was good, how about a 67? That’s what Trump claimed to have shot in 2023, to win that same championship. He wrote, “Now, some people will think that sounds low, but there is no hanky/lanky [sic].”

Trump is a specialist in hanky/lanky. Reilly, in his book, reports that caddies nicknamed him “Pelé”—for his habit of kicking his ball out of the rough and into the fairway.

Bill Clinton was no stranger to hanky/lanky, on and off the golf course. In 1996, Byron York published a long, detailed piece on that president and his golf in The American Spectator: “Clinton’s Bad Lie.”

Falstaff says, “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” Trump has an amazing ability to co-opt others in his grievances, boasts, and fabrications. Last week, I wrote about the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and his embrace of Trump after the 2016 election. In 2017, Graham claimed that Trump had shot a round of 73 with him.

That told me more about Graham than about Trump’s golf.

In 1994, Kim Jong-il, the late North Korean dictator, played his first round of golf. He had a score of 34—over 18 holes. His round included 11 holes-in-one. If you don’t believe that, you can take it up with North Korean state media.

Fidel Castro was not one for golf—although there are some famous, goofy photos of him as a young dictator with his comrade Che Guevara, on the golf course. They are wearing military fatigues and combat boots. Castro effectively banned golf in Cuba, condemning it as a “bourgeois” pursuit.

But his son Antonio managed to play. He was sometimes depicted as a golf champion, as well as a fishing champion. Also, he was an official in national and international baseball federations.

Dictators’ sons like to involve themselves in sports. (I have a number of stories about this in a book, Children of Monsters.) Vassily Stalin was the boss of several Soviet teams. He punished them ruthlessly when they did not succeed. In Iraq, Uday Hussein did the same thing. He was the head of the national soccer federation and the Olympic committee.

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Muhammad Qaddafi headed Libya’s Olympic committee. His brother Saadi headed the soccer federation. He was also a player—the captain of the national team, in fact. Referees never crossed him, and broadcasters were not allowed to mention any other player’s name. They referred to Saadi by name. All the other players, they referred to by their numbers.

Saadi bought his way onto the European circuit for a while. He signed with teams in Italy. The joke in Libya went, “Other players are paid to play, but Saadi pays to play.”

At the end of 2021, an interesting hockey match took place in St. Petersburg, Russia. On one team were Vladimir Putin and the dictator from Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. Also present on the ice were retired Russian hockey stars. The dictators’ team won 18 to 7.

Putin scored seven goals—as many as the other team altogether. Lukashenko scored a measly two goals. But his 17-year-old son redeemed the family honor, scoring four.

It’s easy to laugh at dictators and their pretensions. But shouldn’t Americans be embarrassed when their president claims to have won his 43rd golf championship? By shooting two under par? Maybe that is not as outlandish and outrageous as Kim Jong-il’s 34, but—come on.

In 2016, a colleague of mine, on his way to being a full-time Trump booster, said, “Trump isn’t a liar, he’s a bullshitter.” In the years since, I have not really detected the difference.

Golf is a game of honor. It is a revealer of character. The subtitle of Byron York’s 1996 piece about Clinton was, “The way he plays golf tells you more about his character than any special prosecutor ever will.” The subtitle of Rick Reilly’s 2019 book is “How Golf Explains Trump.”

When I spoke of these issues on social media, a tweeter named Jas Easterly responded with a quote: “If you aren’t playing by the rules, it’s not golf.” He then said that his grandfather Harry had despised cheats. Harry Easterly was the president of the United States Golf Association and a steward and champion of the rules.

A couple of weeks ago, I podcasted with Gabriel Sterling, an elections official in Georgia. He was one of the Republicans who refused to falsify the 2020 presidential election, despite great pressure from Trump & Co. I told a favorite story about Bobby Jones.

In the 1925 US Open, he called a penalty on himself—two strokes—and wound up losing the Open by a stroke. When people praised him for his sportsmanship and honesty, he would have none of it. “Sooner praise a man for not robbing a bank,” said Jones.

Yes. But when bank robbery is in vogue and encouraged—not participating in it is commendable.

Gabe Sterling made an interesting point. The rules of golf are written down, but you have to carry them out. You have to abide by them. Otherwise, they are irrelevant words on paper. And our government functions in much the same manner.

We have “parchment barriers” aplenty, but there’s no substitute for honorable men and women in public life, and in life at large.

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There’s an old expression: “If you have something to say, say it to my face.” As a rule, I criticize public figures when they’re alive and kicking. When they die, I favor praise or silence.

My friend William F. Buckley Jr. would occasionally write a biting obit—as he did when Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist, died in 1995. The writer Florence King said that WFB had authored an “attack obituary” or a “hit obit.”

He arguably had. But Rothbard, an old Buckley antagonist, deserved it.

When Lindsey Graham, the veteran South Carolina senator, died last month, there were many appreciations and many—well, non-appreciations. Today, I propose to write neither type of piece. I will offer some observations, providing angles on a politician of our times.

I first encountered Graham at Davos in the mid-2000s. He was in the company of Senator John McCain, as he often was. Graham clearly relished being in Davos. He relished being “in the arena” wherever that arena was.

In those days, Graham was a bête noire of the Right. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him “Senator Grahamnesty,” for his work on immigration reform. (“Amnesty,” “Grahamnesty,” get it?) Graham was also tagged as a “neocon,” in a pejorative way.

So was John McCain, of course.

“He’s like a son to me,” McCain often said of Graham. In a jocular mood, he’d say, “Lindsey is my illegitimate son.”

I talked with McCain about this in 2015. It was the second-ever episode of my podcast, Q&A, the first having been with Garry Kasparov, the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move.

McCain said that he and Graham had many interests in common—chiefly concerning foreign policy and national security. They were big promoters of freedom, democracy, and human rights. They thought that both America and the world were better off with America engaged in the world.

McCain also noted that Graham was just plain fun. “Entertaining.” “Not boring.”

So true. Graham once told me that when he showed up at some campaign event or civic gathering, “my first ten minutes is standup.”

In 2016, he ran for president—the Republican nomination. He and Donald Trump brawled. Graham said, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.”

He also said—tweeted—“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

The GOP did not get destroyed. Trump, in fact, won. And that changed everything. Many Republicans had objected to Trump, not on grounds that he would be bad for the country, but on grounds that he couldn’t win.

No one got with the program with more alacrity, or brazenness, than Lindsey Graham. In November 2017, he told CNN, “What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy some kind of kook not fit to be president.”

Had Graham forgotten that he had called Trump a “kook” “unfit for office” the year before?

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In the past decade, I have heard the expression “to navigate the Trump era.” How have Republican politicians and journalists “navigated the Trump era”?

It is only human to do some navigation. And it is natural for politicians to be political. (The journalists have less excuse. Truth-telling should be more their bag.)

“You want Graham to have a seat at the table,” I often heard. “You want Graham to play golf with Trump. Better that Graham be in his ear than the isolationists, right?”

Maybe. But Trump has always changed people more than they have changed him.

We must also consider the simple matter of partisanship—“the call of the tribe.” (Mario Vargas Llosa used this phrase in the title of a book.) Graham was a Republican, and where his tribe went, there went he.

But he was probably more aware of this than most. He would comment on his own hypocrisy.

When Trump and his team covered for the Saudi dictatorship after that dictatorship murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Graham said, “If they were in a Democratic administration, I would be all over them for being in the pocket of Saudi Arabia.”

When Trump announced a pullout from Syria later in 2018, Graham said, “If Obama had done this, we’d be going nuts right now: how weak, how dangerous.”

Graham stayed close to Trump right through the afternoon of January 6, 2021, when the mob assaulted the Congress. That night, Graham said, “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough.”

Enough was enough for about three weeks. Graham was then back at Trump’s side, along with pretty much every other Republican in the country.

In this, Graham was a man of our times, an emblem of our times—though more colorful and flagrant than most.

When the United States and Israel launched what would be called the “Iran war” last February, Graham appeared on Fox News and said, “To Donald J. Trump: You just surpassed Ronald Reagan as the most consequential Republican president since Lincoln.” He went on to say, “You’re Reagan plus, plus, plus.”

Was the senator pumping Trump’s ego? Or did he mean it?

“To live is to maneuver,” said Whittaker Chambers (in a line quoted by Bill Buckley). Yes. It is hard, and unwise, to live without maneuvering or navigating. But to a point. You have to stand for something, right? You have to draw some line, right?

Herbert Hoover gibed that FDR was “a chameleon on plaid.” Lindsey Graham once said to a friend of mine, “If you’re lookin’ for consistency, I’m not your guy.”

Congressman Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who served in the House from 1975 to 2007, had the job of speaking to new members at their freshman orientation. He stressed one thing: Figure out what you’re willing to lose your seat over. What principle or policy. If there is no such thing, “then you’re going to do damage here.”

Lindsey Graham would have been reelected unto forever. His predecessor, Strom Thurmond, was in the Senate for almost 50 years.

One evening, Graham and I were speaking at the same conference (with the senator having a bigger role, obviously). We were sitting at the same table when our host was introducing him. Graham was looking at his phone.

Our host noted that Graham had now received more votes than anyone else in South Carolina history. I leaned over and whispered to Graham, “More than Strom?” He nodded yes. Still looking at his phone, he said, “Don’t tell him. He’ll come back.””

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

In June, at the G7 summit in France, President Trump said, “Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections.” America’s enemies have always said that our democracy is a sham. Now we have a president who says it, and on foreign soil.

Who needs Kremlin propaganda? And who undermines trust in American democracy more than the president himself?

Traditionally, the rigging of elections is a job for dictators and their cadres. Last week, Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile, ran an article under the following headline: “As support for Putin slips, the Kremlin lowers the ruling party’s election target amid fears a landslide victory would look suspicious.”

That headline says a lot about the nature of dictatorships.

Russia will “hold” “legislative” “elections” in September. (There will be an unusual number of quotation marks in this piece of mine.) “President” Putin does not have to “run again” until 2030. But he has done pretty well in “elections” past.

In 2000, he squeaked by with 53 percent of the “vote.” (His closest competitor got 29 percent.) Since then, his total has ranged from 64 percent to 87 percent.

Of course, it helps if your main opponents are dead. Boris Nemtsov, the valiant opposition leader, was murdered in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, another valiant one, was murdered in 2024 while in prison.

In a 1987 column, Charles Krauthammer came up with the “Tirana Index.” Named for Albania’s capital, the index holds that, in Krauthammer’s words, “repressiveness correlates with electoral success.” In 1982, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha had won by 1,627,959 votes to 1.

Why was there a need for any opposing vote at all? One vote does not make a fig leaf. Maybe a thousand votes would have been more imaginative?

François Duvalier was not a man for fig leaves. In 1957, he was elected president of Haiti. This election was less corrupt than subsequent elections would be.

In 1961, Duvalier decided to stage a referendum, asking the people whether they would like six more years of him as “president.” They answered in the affirmative—by a vote of 1,320,748 to zero.

Duvalier, humble, said, “I accept the people’s will. As a revolutionary, I have no right to disregard the will of the people.”

Not waiting for the expiration of his “term,” Duvalier staged another referendum in 1964. This time, he asked the people whether they wanted to make him “president” for life. They did—by a vote of 2.8 million to 3,234.

That’s a lot of no votes—almost amounting to a fig leaf.

In 1971, the dictator was ailing and in need of a successor. That would be Jean-Claude, his only son. But according to the Haitian constitution, you had to be 40 to be president. And Jean-Claude was 19.

Duvalier père, ever thoughtful, asked the people whether they wanted the age minimum lowered to 18. In tandem with that, he asked them whether they wanted Jean-Claude to be his successor.

Amazingly, they did, and without a fig leaf: the result was 2,391,916 to zero.

“Papa Doc” died in April 1971, and the 19-year-old “Baby Doc” took over, becoming the youngest national leader in the world. (Those interested in more on this subject may consult my book Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.)

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Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq in 1979. In 1995, it occurred to him to hold a referendum, ratifying his rule. Why do they do it? Why do dictators go through the charade? Their ego may demand it. Also, these charades might be the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

In 1995, 8.4 million “votes” were “cast,” and Saddam Hussein got 99.96 percent of them. Some 3,000 “votes” went the other way—same as in Haiti in 1964.

By 2002, Saddam Hussein was even more popular. He staged another referendum, this time winning 100 percent, in a 100 percent turnout—11,445,638 “votes.”

Putin is more canny than that, you see. He assigns himself more plausible, though equally fraudulent, percentages.

In Egypt, “President” Sisi had an “opponent” in the 2018 “election.” It was an interesting kind of opponent to have: the man, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, endorsed Sisi. Moussa got almost 3 percent of the vote anyway.

Back in 1996, Yasser Arafat allowed an opponent in the Palestinian Authority. She was a grandmother, Samiha Khalil, who got 11.5 percent against Arafat—which was pretty respectable, under the circumstances.

I have written in a jocular or sardonic manner about a grave and maddening subject: the faking of elections by dictators and the denial of rights to citizens.

For many years, I heard people say, “Castro is popular with his people, you know!” One answer was this: “If that’s true, why doesn’t he prove it? If he is so popular, why doesn’t he allow opposition parties? Why doesn’t he allow independent media? Why doesn’t he allow free and fair elections?”

Also: “Why does he exile, jail, maim, or murder his critics?”

In recent years, I have heard people say, “Putin is popular with his people, you know!” The same answer applies.

Let me end where I began, with the United States. On January 2, 2021, President Trump got on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia. Trump had lost the election in November 2020, and he was trying to overturn it. One state he was trying to reverse was Georgia.

Trump said to Raffensperger, “What I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes.” That is a specific, not a ballpark, number. Biden had won Georgia by 11,779. Trump was not even allowing himself a cushion.

On Thanksgiving Day, at the White House, Trump had said of Raffensperger, “He’s an enemy of the people.”

Dictators, rather than democrats, talk that way. So far, our constitutional “guardrails” have held, more or less. But whack on them long enough, and who knows?

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

A small incident on July 15 relates to something bigger about where we stand—“we” meaning the United States.

The Navy’s Blue Angels conducted a flyover in Pensacola, Florida, where they are based. One pilot flew dangerously close to the beach, sending umbrellas and chairs flying.

Fox News, on its website, played the story this way: “Blue Angels thrill beachgoers with wild low flyover.” Yes, some were thrilled. Other people were maybe a little less so.

One of these was Captain Adam Bryan, the Blue Angels’ commanding officer. In an interview the day after, he said, “One of our pilots found himself over the beach, over a crowd, in an unsafe situation.”

Bryan went on to say, “We’ll have a heavy review of what happened yesterday to ensure that, one, we don’t put ourselves in unsafe situations again and, two, we learn from it.”

Captain Bryan graduated from the Naval Academy in 2005 and has been honored many times. He is clearly a professional.

The Trump administration did not sound like Bryan, at all. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, posted a picture of a flyover—if not the specific flyover in question—and said, “Carry on Patriots.”

Parnell’s boss, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, tweeted, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.” (This was a play on an old satirical line: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”)

The White House posted a Blue Angels picture and said, “It’s okay to love America.” Had anyone suggested otherwise?

Then chiming in was the acting secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao. He posted a video of the flyover and said, “That’s the sound of Freedom!” He also said, “No reprimands. No firings. No problem.”

One of the president’s sons, Eric Trump, got into the act, tweeting, “Can’t stand the manufactured outrage by the low-T mainstream media.” “Low-T” stands for “low-testosterone,” and it’s a new putdown in the MAGA vocabulary.

Outstanding in this whole affair was the pilot himself, Lieutenant Chris Houben, of Geneva, Illinois. He talked with the Florida House representative for Pensacola, Michelle Salzman, who wrote the following about him:

“He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t try to shift blame. He simply talked about the miscalculated turn, something no pilot ever wants to experience … More than anything, he talked about the weight he’s been carrying since that moment.”

Salzman continued:

“He shared that he was shaken by what happened and needed time to process it. You could see the disappointment on his face. This wasn’t someone brushing off a mistake, it was someone who holds himself to an incredibly high standard and was deeply affected by falling short of it.”

That is the kind of man we ought to want in our military.

For many years, I have had two prayers (among others) for Americans on the right: that they recover a proper sense of patriotism and that they recover a proper sense of manliness. Patriotism is not chest-thumping jingoism, and manliness is not grunting, preening machismo.

On the Fourth of July, eight Army pilots, in Apache helicopters, did a flyover of their own. This was on the South Carolina coast. Apparently, the flyover was problematic, and the Army immediately suspended the pilots, with an investigation pending.

But Hegseth tweeted, “We’ll fix this. Carry on, Patriots.” Not long after, his spokesman, Parnell, tweeted, “Effective immediately, the suspension of all involved South Carolina pilots has been lifted. Carry on Patriots.”

Parnell, unlike his boss, has no time for commas.

Still another incident had occurred in March. Apache pilots paid a visit to the home of Kid Rock, outside Nashville. He calls his home the “Southern White House.” Kid Rock is sort of an official artist of the MAGA GOP. For example, he performed at the 2024 Republican convention.

On that day in March, Kid Rock and the pilots exchanged salutes, as the helicopters hovered. On social media, the rocker posted a video of the moment, along with a statement that began, “This is a level of respect that [the] shit for brains Governor of California will never know.” (In this period, Governor Gavin Newsom and President Trump were feuding.)

The Army immediately suspended the pilots with an investigation pending. Hegseth put a quick stop to that, saying—what else?—“Carry on, patriots.”

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

A month later, Hegseth and Kid Rock took joyrides together in Apaches.

More than a few people wondered, “What if Apache pilots had hovered over the home of Bruce Springsteen, an anti-Trump rocker? Would that have been cool? Would the pilots have been ‘patriots’ then?”

Of all the institutions in America, it would be nice if our military were free of partisan and tribal politics.

I think of Ron Silver, the movie actor, who died in 2009. He was an ardent Democrat and liberal activist. At Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, in 1993, Silver saw a military flyover at the National Mall. At first, he bristled. Why should the military be involved? But then he thought, “They’re our planes now.”

He got over this. In fact, Silver became a “9/11 Democrat,” meaning a Democrat who supported President George W. Bush after the War on Terror began. Silver spoke at the Republican convention in 2004, the one that renominated Bush.

Back to this business of testosterone (I’m afraid). Last week, Secretary Hegseth posted a video of himself, which he headed “The High-T Department of War.” (The Trump administration has been styling the Department of Defense the “Department of War.”)

In the video, Hegseth said that the Pentagon would be screening servicemen for their testosterone levels.

“What is a man?” is an ancient question, and so is “What makes a soldier?” We might explore these questions at length another time. For now, I would like to recall another Trump secretary of defense, very different from Hegseth.

He was Jim Mattis, who served from 2017 to 2019. Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general. He commanded our forces in three wars. Trump was attracted to Mattis’s nickname: “Mad Dog.” But the general had another nickname: the “Warrior Monk.” Mattis is a very thoughtful, sober type.

Hopelessly at odds with Trump, Mattis resigned. Trump then pronounced him “the world’s most overrated general.”

For a time, Trump had another former Marine Corps general at his side: John F. Kelly. Kelly was first the secretary of homeland security and then the president’s chief of staff. At almost the same time as Mattis, Kelly resigned, dismayed at what he had seen.

Kelly is at the center of one of my favorite stories about patriotism. Before the confirmation hearing on Kelly’s nomination to the DHS post, a young White House aide suggested to him that he wear an American-flag lapel pin.

Bear in mind, Kelly had commanded troops in one war, Iraq, and lost a son, Robert, in another, Afghanistan.

Kelly said to the young aide, “I am the American flag.” What need had he of a pin?

Over and over, Pete Hegseth has ousted senior and experienced officers from the military—men and women who know our traditions and ethos. The most recent to go was General Chris Donahue. There must be civilian control over the military—but let it be as wise and apolitical as possible.

A politically charged military is a threat to democratic health.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

There are some 1,300 political prisoners in Cuba, and two of them are Félix Navarro and Saylí Navarro. They are father and daughter. It is very rare for a father and daughter to be political prisoners. I can think of no other example.

Félix, 73, is in Agüica Prison, a notorious maximum-security facility. Saylí, 40, is in La Bellotex, a women’s prison. Both of these prisons are in Matanzas Province.

No one in the Cuban democracy movement is more esteemed by his fellow democrats than Félix Navarro. In March 2022, the Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba put out a statement, saying, “Félix Navarro represents all the solid values that enrich the human soul: order, justice, moderation, humility, and honesty.”

The statement continues, “Hardened in the face of the unjust sentences suffered for defending freedom and rights for Cubans, he has not lost an iota of his nobility, despite the cruelty to which he has been subjected, especially now, when his daughter has also been sentenced to prison.”

Saylí Navarro is cut from the same cloth as her father.

The National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, will honor various people with Democracy Awards in a ceremony at Mount Vernon this September. One of the honorees (in absentia) will be Félix.

NED was founded in 1983 at the instigation of President Reagan. Last year, Elon Musk, when he was a senior adviser to President Trump in charge of cutting government, said this about NED: “That evil organization needs to be dissolved.”

Fortunately, that blessed organization still breathes.

Félix Navarro Rodríguez was born on July 10, 1953, in Perico, Matanzas Province. His family was a peasant family. Bright and curious—and with a desire to help others—Félix became a teacher. But in the 1980s he took the fateful step of democratic activism.

In 1992, he was arrested for such acts as distributing pro-democracy posters. He was sentenced to prison on charges of being “anti-revolution” and spreading “enemy propaganda.” He was released in 1994 but stripped of his license to teach.

Saylí Navarro Álvarez was born on March 11, 1986, on the Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth. Her youth would not be like others’. She was six when her father first went to prison. The Navarros were subject to the indignities and horrors visited on an “anti-revolutionary” family: raids on their home, arbitrary detentions, etc. Young Saylí, filled with anxiety, experienced hair loss.

But she became something strong and extraordinary. “I had to grow up prematurely,” she said in a 2013 interview with Ivette Leyva Martínez. “I feel good about what I do, I assume it as something natural. My dream is to see a democratic and legally constituted state arise in Cuba.”

In March 2003 came the “Black Spring”—the dictatorship’s crackdown on pro-democracy groups. Seventy-five democracy leaders were imprisoned, including Félix Navarro. His wife, Sonia Álvarez Campillo, and their daughter, Saylí, were among the founders of the Ladies in White.

This is a group of prisoners’ relatives who attend Mass every Sunday, wearing white, and walk peacefully through the streets. Those walks are seldom peaceful, however: the ladies are harassed and attacked by agents of the state.

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Over and over, Saylí was detained, often violently. She said in that 2013 interview, “I never resist arrest, but they always use excessive force and hit you. I am able to overcome my fear because I know they are the ones who are committing a crime.”

Owing to her position as a dissident’s daughter, and a dissident herself, Saylí was denied the higher education available to others. But she is obviously wiser than most.

After about eight years, in late 2010 and early 2011, the Black Spring prisoners were released, in a deal brokered by the Vatican. Almost all of the prisoners were exiled to Spain, as a condition of their release. The last two prisoners to be released were Félix Navarro and José Daniel Ferrer—as they had refused to go into exile. They vowed to continue their work on the island, which they did.

On July 11, 2021, the island exploded, in mass protests. Many were arrested that day. On July 12, Félix went to his local police station, to inquire about those arrested—which was like him. He himself was arrested, along with the woman who had accompanied him: Saylí.

Félix was sentenced to nine years in prison, Saylí to eight. On what charges? You know, it doesn’t matter. If a dictatorship wants to imprison you, it just will. But, for the record, the made-up charges included “contempt,” “disturbing the peace,” and “disobedience.”

It probably goes without saying that the conditions in which the Navarros are kept, in their respective prisons, are vile and inhuman. Moreover, the 73-year-old Félix is in bad health: with diabetes, post-COVID pulmonary complications, and yet more ailments.

A few months ago—on April 8—Félix was savagely beaten in prison. They then handcuffed him and threw him into a punishment cell. Anamely Ramos, a veteran democracy activist, spoke for many when she said:

“Neither his age, nor his condition, nor the respect he commands has been sufficient to contain the violence. Félix should never have been in prison. … It is public knowledge that he is an innocent man.”

But he is not innocent of opposing the dictatorship and standing up for the rights of his fellow Cubans and human beings. Neither is his daughter.

In recent weeks, the auxiliary bishop of Havana, Eloy Ricardo Domínguez Martínez, has paid visits to both of them. He has proposed a deal: release at the price of exile. Both Navarros have refused.

Exile is a touchy subject. “Stay or go.” It is a personal, individual subject. There are great and heroic dissidents who accept exile, however grudgingly, with whatever agony. And there are others who do not. Some have no choice at all.

And whether you really have a choice can be gray …

Cubans, wherever they live, are in awe of the Navarros, and of the others like them. A totalitarian society tends to give birth to heroes. Cuba has.

Félix and Saylí are “patriots,” says Maria Werlau, the co-founder and executive director of Cuba Archive. “That, plus their great project of helping people, is considered dangerous by the Cuban dictatorship. Thus, they are paying such a high price. Their suffering breaks my heart.”

I suspect we will see the Navarros freed one day. And even Cuba itself.

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This piece was originally published on Onward and Upward by Jay Nordlinger.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

America is a “universal nation,” yes, but it’s also a specific one, a peculiar one. Here I borrow a word from the King James Bible, which refers repeatedly to “a peculiar people.”

We are a nation “in the air,” if you will—a nation of principles and ideals—but also a nation “on the ground.”

We come from England, and from Plymouth specifically, you might say. We have in our roots the Mayflower Compact and the Plymouth Colony.

A few years later, John Winthrop came, to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before his group left England, Winthrop said, “… we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

Of course, he was borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount, and what could be more universal than that?

Some 150 years after these Pilgrims and Puritans, we had the drama of our revolution. In 1976, our bicentennial year, my parents took us to Boston to walk the Freedom Trail, which traces revolutionary sites. This year—our 250th—a friend of mine has taken his own kids to walk the trail.

Part of our past is our civil war, which drenched America in blood. Is it past, entirely? (Cue William Faulkner, who wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) Newcomers to America often have a hard time understanding our racial sensitivities.

Like many another people, we have our songs: “At the River,” “Shenandoah,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” (Spirituals constitute an American songbook unto themselves.) “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Good Vibrations,” “Sweet Home Alabama.”

We have our lines of poetry: “I hear America singing” (“the varied carols I hear”). “A dream deferred.” The “City of the Big Shoulders” (meaning Chicago). When I was a kid, there was an ad slogan, capturing something essential: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.”

When I was a student abroad, a lot of my fellow Americans wanted to blend in. They were loath to be taken for an American (and plenty of them had been taught to be ashamed of their country). I stood out like an American thumb, and still do.

At the moment, I am in Italy, where I was a student. You can spot me as an American from 200 paces: shorts, golf shirt, a certain comportment. I ask for ice for my drinks and (sometimes) butter for my bread.

I might as well sing “Yankee Doodle.”

And yet and yet …

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I know some people who wish that those words had been omitted from the Declaration. “Airy-fairy rhetoric, universalist hokum.” But as some of us see it: classically and necessarily American.

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Important to many of us is what Lincoln said of Henry Clay in his eulogy of him: “Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty …” Lincoln went on to say, “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.”

You have heard of people who believe that they were “born American but in the wrong place”—meaning that they were born in a different country. I have known such people. Some were able to join us, and become citizens, and some were not.

I remember what Reagan said in his very last speech as president. He quoted a letter he had received: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Five years ago, I met a computer engineer and tech entrepreneur in Dallas, Mark Haidar. I had a talk with him at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Haidar is included in a book of Bush’s paintings: Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.

Mark Haidar—originally “Mahmoud”—grew up in Lebanon. His family suffered many hardships and horrors.

One day, two employees of the United Nations showed up at Mahmoud’s school. “This was the day that changed my life,” Haidar told me. They had brought with them two computers—by which the boy was fascinated.

He found something called “Encarta,” an early Microsoft encyclopedia. He began reading about the United States and discovered the Declaration of Independence—a document that excited him. He knew, in his core, it was true: Human beings have rights that no man or system can negate.

From then on, he had a tradition. Every time he got a new notebook in school—like a spiral notebook—he would write on its cover seven words: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

America is important to us Americans, needless to say, but it is also important to the world at large: as an example of ordered liberty and human dignity; as an opponent of tyranny; as a haven for the oppressed.

One of the most moving, and painful, reporting trips I have ever taken was to Denmark last year. I talked to a bunch of Danes about America’s new posture toward their country: one of hostility and belligerence.

They were heartbroken. They had loved and defended America all their lives. One of these men was in tears, a sight I will not soon forget.

“So what?” some might sneer. “America First!” Well, America’s openness, generosity, and leadership have benefited one country above all: America.

There is an Italian expression, fare una brutta figura—roughly, to put forth an ugly face. Last week, an Italian friend remarked to me, “I’m sorry to say it, but, these days, America is putting forth una brutta figura.”

What can be done about it? Each of us, as individuals, can put forth the best face we can.

It was Carl Schurz who made possibly my favorite statement ever about patriotism. (He was a German immigrant who became a Union general, a US senator, and so on.) “My country, right or wrong—when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set.”

I also like what Miss Julia said. Formally, she was Julia L. Coleman, a high school teacher and administrator in Plains, Georgia. One of her students was Jimmy Carter, who liked to quote her: “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

I’m going to close with John Winthrop. Before setting sail for the New World, he told his fellow voyagers, “If we mess up this experiment of ours, our name will be mud throughout the world.” I have paraphrased, of course. You want the real stuff, however stern it is?

“… if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world”—a bad story, a negative example.

With freedom comes responsibility. (You have heard this a time or two.) I ask my fellow Americans, aspirant or actual: Would we have it any other way?

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This column concludes our mini series looking at America’s milestone birthdays—and how contemporary leaders handled those anniversaries. Read Part I on Calvin Coolidge at America’s 150th, and last week’s installment on Gerald Ford at America’s bicentennial.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

A couple of articles ago, I quoted Donald Rumsfeld, who said, “You go to war with the army you have.” By the same token, you mark a major American anniversary with the president you have.

For our 50th, we had John Quincy Adams. For our centennial, we had Ulysses S. Grant. For our 150th, we had Calvin Coolidge. For our bicentennial, we had Gerald R. Ford. And today, for our 250th, we have Donald J. Trump.

In recent days, he has created a “culture war” over the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. This “war” is an excellent example of Trump’s modus operandi. You can read details elsewhere. I would like to make a single point.

According to Trump, the Reflecting Pool ought to be “American Flag Blue.” Actually, a reflecting pool is meant to reflect—in this case, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the natural surroundings.

Trump’s presidency is a reflection of our nation, is it not? “Here, the people rule.” In a democracy, the people say something about who they are in the political choices they make.

It was almost inevitable that we had cage fighting on the White House lawn. Before that, there was a weigh-in of the contestants at the Lincoln Memorial.

At the end of one of the bouts, a fighter yelled, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”

(There is a fixed belief in quarters of our country that the former first lady is, in fact, a man named “Mike.” I first learned of this belief about ten years ago.)

Speaking at Gettysburg, Lincoln said, “… we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.” I do not believe that the White House or the Lincoln Memorial should be hallowed. These are not sacred spaces; they are civic spaces.

But, you know: a little dignity and respect.

In 2020, President Trump arranged to have a Fox News interview inside the Lincoln Memorial. I thought this was gross. Also: can you imagine if President Obama had arranged such a thing with, say, MSNBC?

William F. Buckley Jr. said, “Within every conservative is a streak of libertarianism.” (WFB is thought of, rightly, as a conservative, but he sometimes described himself as a “libertarian.”) I further contend that within every conservative—and every liberal—is a streak of populism.

Don’t most of us smile on thinking of Andrew Jackson’s (raucous) first inauguration?

I must say, however, that recent years have narrowed my populist streak to a barely visible thread.

It is a trick of populists to say that if you object to such things as cage fighting on the White House lawn, you are a snob, an elitist, who looks down on “real people.”

There are many things you might say in return—including, “You have too dim a view of ‘real people.’”

Over the course of my life, I have seen high culture largely erased from the public square. There is barely any room for “middlebrow” culture—Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, say.

In 1961, the Kennedys invited Pablo Casals, the venerable Spanish cellist, to play at the White House. (It was not his first time. He had played for President McKinley in 1898.)

Vladimir Horowitz, the great Russian pianist, played recitals for Carter and Reagan. (The latter awarded Horowitz the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Leontyne Price sang for Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. Marilyn Horne sang for Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. One could go on and on.

Kid Rock seems to be the artist laureate of the Trump administration and the GOP. Obviously, there is a place for Kid Rock in our culture—and in our official proceedings. Millions love him. But how about a place for the music of Ives, Barber, or the aforementioned Copland?

Might we hear a little poetry by Whitman, Dickinson, or Frost? (Robert Frost recited a poem of his at Kennedy’s inauguration.)

Everything is downward, downward.

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As for the festivities on July 4 itself, President Trump has announced that the nation will see “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.” This is par for the course.

An old expression applies to Trump: “He has to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”

In the past, our presidents at least paid lip service to being “president of all the people.” Trump makes no effort at all. George W. Bush described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” Trump is a master of division.

Here is a recent presidential missive, typical:

Last week, Barack Obama inaugurated his presidential library. In attendance were the living ex-presidents and their wives: the Clintons, the Bush 43s, and the Bidens.

In 2013, I attended the opening ceremony of Bush 43’s library (and wrote about it here). Sharing the stage with Bush were all the living ex-presidents and their wives—and the incumbent president and his wife, too: the Carters, the Bush 41s, the Clintons, and the Obamas.

“The establishment,” some people sneer. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is: “This is the way we do things here in America.” For instance, the outgoing president attends the inauguration of his successor. In January 2021, Donald Trump refused.

(Joe Biden attended both of Trump’s inaugurations—first as the outgoing vice president, second as the outgoing president.)

No foreign adversary maligns our country more than our president himself does. At the G7 summit in France this month, Trump said, “Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections.” Who needs Kremlin propaganda?

I myself have been in Italy lately. And President Trump and the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, have been exchanging harsh words. Trump claimed that Meloni had “begged” to have her picture taken with him at the G7. Meloni said that this was a lie.

Does anyone doubt Meloni? Even Republican voters, in their heart of hearts?

When I was a student in Italy in 1984, a lot of people around me—Italian and American—despised President Reagan, and bad-mouthed America in the bargain. I delighted in defending both (and even got some grudging agreement).

All these years later, I find myself saying “Brava!” to the Italian leader, for telling the plain truth about the current occupant of the White House.

Above, I said “downward, downward.” I am in such a mood. In Verdi’s Falstaff, the fat knight says, “Mondo reo. Non c’è più virtù. Tutto declina.” Wicked world. There is no longer virtue. Everything is in decline.

Yes, I know: I’m a walking cliché. In every era, older people—especially conservatives—say, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” In my defense, however, there is no lack of evidence.

And yet, just as men have worse angels, they have better angels, as Lincoln said. May they swell in chorus, pronto!

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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This column is Part II in a mini series looking at America’s milestone birthdays—and how contemporary leaders handled those anniversaries. Read last week’s installment on Calvin Coolidge at America’s 150th, and stay tuned for our coverage of Donald Trump at the semiquincentennial.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Last week, I wrote about President Calvin Coolidge and the speech he gave in 1926 about the Declaration of Independence. That year, America was marking the 150th anniversary of the Declaration.

Fifty years later, Gerald R. Ford was president. I remember that year, 1976, our Bicentennial, pretty well. I was 12.

With every passing week, I was becoming more interested in national and world affairs. The year 1976 was not only our Bicentennial, it was also a presidential election year.

Fresh on the scene was Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia. On the Republican side, President Ford was battling with Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, for their party’s nomination.

I listened to the GOP convention in Kansas City on the radio. (I grant you, this was somewhat abnormal in a 12-year-old.)

For years already, I had loved the American founding. And 1976 was a bonanza for lovers of 1776 and all that.

Circulating in our money were “Bicentennial quarters.” It was cool to get one—not just a regular old quarter.

On television (CBS), we had the “Bicentennial Minute.” Nightly, there would be some nugget about the Revolution.

I remember the tall ships, gathered in New York Harbor, and later in Boston.

I remember the royals, too: Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip. They participated in our Bicentennial activities. Pretty sporting of them, I thought.

They gave us a “Bicentennial Bell,” cast at the same foundry in London as our Liberty Bell. The inscription on the Bicentennial Bell ends with “LET FREEDOM RING.”

That was very sporting, indeed. Those words come from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” our patriotic song, which has the cheek to use the tune of “God Save the King” (or Queen).

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July 4, 1976, was a very busy day for President Ford. But, before getting to that day, I would like to touch on the day after—July 5. Ford presided over a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, Jefferson’s home.

He spoke to the new Americans about the place of immigration in our national story. People had always come from all over, he said, bringing something of the old, to blend with the new.

“Such transfusions of traditions and cultures, as well as of blood, have made America unique among nations and Americans a new kind of people. There is little the world has that is not native to the United States today.”

We have been able to offer citizenship to pretty much everybody. How? Because, said Ford, “we are uniquely a community of values, as distinct from a religious community, a racial community, a geographic community, or an ethnic community.”

Yes.

Our nation was founded, the president continued, “not on ancient legends or conquests or physical likeness or language, but on a certain political value which Jefferson’s pen so eloquently expressed.”

What did that pen express? “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” etc.

Everyone has his own idea of what it is to be an American. We fight about that nearly every day. Here is Ford’s idea:

“To be an American is to subscribe to those principles which the Declaration of Independence proclaims and the Constitution protects—the political values of self-government, liberty and justice, equal rights, and equal opportunity.”

And “these beliefs are the secrets of America’s unity from diversity—in my judgment the most magnificent achievement of our 200 years as a nation.”

Ford ended his remarks with an admonition:

“Remember that none of us are more than caretakers of this great country. Remember that the more freedom you give to others, the more you will have for yourself. Remember that without law there can be no liberty.”

Right on. Ordered liberty is the name of the game. The noun and the adjective are equally important. Liberty without order is something like anarchy, and order without liberty is—unfreedom.

About immigration, I would like to mention a simple fact. In our most recent presidential campaign, the two main nominees were Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Three of their four parents were immigrants. And the fourth—Trump’s father—was the son of immigrants.

This is classically American.

On July 4, 1976, while we were absorbed in tall ships and the like, there was big news from far away: Israel had rescued its hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, in a daring raid. Only one Israeli commando lost his life—Jonathan Netanyahu (brother of the future prime minister).

In the morning, President Ford delivered remarks at Valley Forge. He began, “They came here in the snows of winter over a trail marked with the blood of their rag-bound feet.”

That is an arresting sentence.

Further on, he told a story about the Battle of Concord. A veteran of that battle was interviewed at the age of 91. His interviewer asked, in essence, “Why did you do it? Why did you take up arms against the King? Had you been especially oppressed?”

“No,” came the answer, “never paid a penny for one of them stamps, never drank any tea, never heard of Locke. Only read the Bible and the Almanac.”

(The Stamp Act and the Tea Act were hated and resented by the American patriots, and the philosopher John Locke was a prime articulator of political freedom.)

Well then, why did he do it?

“Young man,” said the old man, “what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: We had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean that we should.”

A few hours after appearing at Valley Forge, Ford spoke at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He said, “Our Founding Fathers knew their Bibles as well as their Blackstone” (the standard book on law).

The population in general knew the Bible, if not Blackstone. Think of the Concord vet we have just heard from.

Our founders, said Ford, “boldly reversed the age-old political theory that kings derive their powers from God and asserted that both powers and unalienable rights belong to the people as direct endowments from their Creator.”

What’s more, “they declared that governments are instituted among men to secure their rights and to serve their purposes, and governments continue only so long as they have the consent of the governed.”

This is A-B-C—kindergarten talk. But it must be learned and relearned, in perpetuity.

Here is a shrewd point, made by Ford: “Seldom in history have the men who made a revolution seen it through, but the United States was fortunate.” How so? “The result of their deliberations and compromises was our Constitution, which William Gladstone, a great British prime minister, called ‘the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.’”

Have you ever thought about the relationship between the two “great charters” on which we are founded? In a pithy sentence, Ford said, “The Constitution was created to make the promise of the Declaration come true.”

He ended his speech by asking for “a moment of silent prayer and meditation in gratitude for all that we have received and to ask continued safety and happiness for each of us and for the United States of America.”

I have cited a lot of Fourth of July rhetoric—literal Fourth of July rhetoric. But, you know? I believe it all. And I hope that Americans will want to keep this unusual project going.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

More from The Next Move:

This column is Part I in a mini series looking at America’s milestone birthdays—and how contemporary leaders handled those anniversaries. Stay tuned for our coverage of President Ford at America’s bicentennial and Donald Trump at the semiquincentennial.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

“You go to war with the army you have,” said Donald Rumsfeld. By the same token, you mark a major American anniversary with the president you have. We are now celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

In 1826, on the 50th, John Quincy Adams was president. On the day itself—July 4, 1826—his father, John Adams, died. So did another former president, Thomas Jefferson.

In 1876, on the centennial, Ulysses S. Grant was president. (Short years before, on the field of battle, he had played a pivotal role in saving the Union.) In 1926, on the 150th anniversary, Calvin Coolidge was president. In 1976, for the bicentennial, it was Gerald R. Ford. And today, of course, the president is Donald Trump.

Here and now, I would like to focus on 1926. That year, Coolidge delivered an excellent speech—even a profound one—on the Declaration of Independence, and on the American founding in general.

That it speaks to us today—even in urgent tones—need hardly be said. But I will say it regardless: it does.

Coolidge delivered the speech in Philadelphia on the day after, i.e., July 5. His birthday, by the way, was July 4. He is the only president to have been born on the Fourth of July.

This president was known as “Silent Cal,” because he was taciturn. Do you know this famous anecdote about him? Whether it is true or not, it is illustrative.

When it is her turn in a receiving line, a woman says to Coolidge, “I have a bet with my husband that I can get you to say more than two words.” Coolidge replies, “You lose.”

He may have been sparing with his words—but he usually made them matter, as he did on that July day in 1926.

Coolidge described the Declaration of Independence as “the most important civil document in the world.” Its publication, he said, was “an incomparable event in the history of government.” That is not mere Fourth of July rhetoric—or Fifth of July rhetoric—but true, or at least arguably so.

“Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics,” said Coolidge, “every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”

I believe we are in need of “solace and consolation” today, amid that “clash” and that “welter.” Do we care to turn to our “two great charters”? Are we sufficiently aware of them? They may be the only thing that can hold us together.

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When I was in college, I sometimes heard the American Revolution mocked as “conservative”—not a real revolution, such as France would see 13 years later! Well, Coolidge embraced this. Referring to the Declaration, he said, “It had about it nothing of the lawless and disordered nature of a riotous insurrection.”

(The words “riotous insurrection” might remind you of January 6, as they do me.)

Our founding was “in no sense a radical movement,” said Coolidge, “but took on the dignity of a resistance to illegal usurpations. It was conservative…”

If you want to start a brawl, just say, “America is an idea” (apart from blood and soil). In Philadelphia, Calvin Coolidge said that our founders established a new nation, yes, but also a new kind of nation: one built on ideas, principles, ideals.

He cited a big three—three “very definite propositions,” as he called them: all men are created equal; they have inalienable rights; the just powers of government come from the consent of the governed.

In 1926, as today, there were people who thought that the Declaration was outdated, that we needed something more suited to modern life. Coolidge would have none of it.

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.”

Do you fancy yourself a progressive? Do I? What are we progressing from?

“No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions,” said Coolidge. “If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward…”

Backward to when?

To a time “when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.”

Every day, I hear the claims of the “post-liberals.” To me, it usually seems that they are “pre-liberals.” The Enlightenment was a big mistake, and so was the American founding. Some of them say so outright (which has the virtue of candor).

You know what Benjamin Franklin said, after the Constitutional Convention. When someone asked, “Do we have a republic or a monarchy?,” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Here is Coolidge:

“A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if it roots be destroyed. In its main features, the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions.”

For example?

“Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world.”

And here comes a warning:

“Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

Government has a role, right? It does. “Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed…” There is a but coming.

“…but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.”

That last sentence deserves to be read twice, as does the whole speech.

I will leave you with a passage—another one—that is beautiful, thought-provoking, and, to my sense, true:

“We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.”

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Advisory Board Member Anne Applebaum and RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Concert halls have been filled with American music this year as our country marks its 250th anniversary. A self-consciously American concert took place at Lincoln Center, in New York, a couple of Sundays ago.

The sponsoring organization was the Together in Hope Project, based in Minneapolis. The organization has been carrying out a project within a project: Sing Democracy 250. The motto of this project is “Uniting in harmony to renew democracy’s promise.”

That is something to get the attention of a music critic who is affiliated with the Renew Democracy Initiative. (I have been the music critic of The New Criterion, the monthly arts-and-letters journal, for many years.)

A co-founder of the Together in Hope Project, Celia Ellingson, made some remarks before the concert at Lincoln Center. She concluded her remarks by saying that we Americans must do all we can “to ensure that our democracy is not just remembered but renewed for the next 250 years.”

On hand were three choirs, combined. One of them was a local group: the “oratorio choir” from Stuyvesant High School, an institution better known for its scientific whizzes than for its musicians. Playing with the choirs was the Main Line Symphony Orchestra, from Greater Philadelphia.

These forces were conducted by G. Phillip Shoultz III—GPS3. He also served as a kind of emcee for the evening. In his remarks to the audience—about democracy and its challenges—he sounded like a civic pastor.

The concert began, fittingly enough, with the national anthem. It was in A flat, rather than the customary B flat. And it had been arranged by Shoultz himself. It is a skillful, pleasing arrangement, different enough to be ear-catching, not so different as to be distracting or self-advertising.

There were two big works on the program, beginning with Redeem the Dream, a kind of oratorio. It was composed by Brandon A. Boyd, who works at the University of Missouri.

Redeem the Dream begins with lines from the Declaration of Independence—the most famous lines of all: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” It continues with a canonical American poem: “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1935 by Langston Hughes.

The poem calls on America to live up to its promises and standards and ideals. To be its best self.

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At the beginning of this year, I reviewed a new work called American Lament, which sets parts of the Hughes poem. Music aside, I objected to bowdlerization.

“For instance, ‘every man’ becomes ‘everyone,’ ‘Indian’ becomes ‘Native,’ ‘Negro’ becomes ‘black man,’ and so on. Is that really necessary? Wouldn’t an audience understand that different words and phrases have been used in different eras?”

In any case, Redeem the Dream leaves Hughes in the original, which is wise. He is hard to edit or improve on. He knows rhythm and phrasing—and sensibility—better than most of us do.

Today, I am not wearing my music critic’s hat, but I will comment briefly on Brandon A. Boyd’s work, this semi-oratorio, if you will. It is eclectic. It has flavors of jazz, swing, pop, gospel. The choirs sometimes swayed back and forth, and the audience sometimes clapped along.

The work is full of affection, in addition to eclecticism. I was reminded, in some sections, of Wynton Marsalis’s Abyssinian Mass (2008).

After Redeem the Dream came US, another “semi-oratorio” (although maybe I can do without the prefix, in both cases). As Richard Haass explained in introductory remarks from the stage, the title refers to “us,” as in “We the People,” but also to the United States.

Richard Haass? The American diplomat who for 20 years was the president of the Council on Foreign Relations? What was he doing there?

In 2023, Haass published a book called The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. And it is on this book that US is based.

The composer is Michael Bussewitz-Quarm, “whose music engages with pressing social and environmental issues.” (I have quoted from the composer’s bio.)

US is not dissimilar to Redeem the Dream, in that it is eclectic, affirmative, and listenable. One might groove along to it, as many a chorister did (and some audience members too).

The first of Richard Haass’s ten good habits is “Be informed.” The second is “Get involved.” The third, “Support the teaching of civics” (amen). The fourth, “Remain civil.” They are all pretty good, and well-nigh inarguable.

Unusual for a libretto, this particular one is mainly a series of quotations, from a range of Americans. These include presidents: Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Reagan, George W. Bush, Obama.

Other Americans include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Harvey Milk, John McCain, and James Mattis. That’s variety.

I like what Frederick Douglass says, under “Be informed”: “A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”

Here is Wilma Mankiller, the Cherokee leader, under “Get involved”: “The desire to do something and contribute was stronger than the fear of speaking up.”

One of Haass’s ten good habits is “Stay open to compromise.” Naturally, we hear from the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay: “All legislation, all government, all society, is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.”

I quite like what JFK says, in this same category: “Compromise need not mean cowardice. Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage.”

When I was coming of age, I heard Reagan say, over and over, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” I used to roll my eyes a little. Sure, he was right in theory, I thought, but in practice? Suffice it to say, I don’t roll my eyes anymore.

This quotation is included in US.

The concert ended as it began, with an anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” popularly known as “the black national anthem.” Is this separatist? It is complementary, I think, and, regardless, it is a great entry in the American treasury.

“Lift Every Voice” became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, believe it or not. (This was Obama vs. McCain.) I wrote about it, here.

The song was written in 1900 to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. The music is by J. Rosamond Johnson and the words are by his brother, James Weldon Johnson. If you will indulge a personal memory: I had the pleasure of teaching “Lift Every Voice” to summer campers in 1983, between my freshman and sophomore years of college.

This concert at Lincoln Center—Sing Democracy 250—was maybe a little corny, a little hokey. But that is so much better than cynical or nihilistic—or unpatriotic. The worse politics looks, the more we depend on civil society, which includes people who lift up their voice and sing.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Advisory Board Member Anne Applebaum and RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Since we are adults, let us stipulate that democracies often have to engage with dictatorships, and that foreign policy is not for the pure. A lot of nose-holding is involved. Paramount is the national interest, and realism is required.

Yet America has long been a nation apart—not merely “another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.” I have quoted a phrase from the first President Bush.

He saw America as “a unique nation, with a special role in the world.”

Once, President Carter was meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister. Carter brought up the case of a political prisoner: Anatoly Shcharansky (later known in Israel as “Natan Sharansky”). Gromyko was nonplussed. The United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear arsenals to discuss. And the president wanted to talk about a prisoner?

Shcharansky, in Gromyko’s words, was but “a microscopic dot.”

Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, always brought a list of political prisoners when he met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev—a list of prisoners that he (Reagan) was especially interested in. Gorbachev grumbled, “Too many lists.”

A very different president is Donald Trump. The matter of human rights does not seem to figure in his thinking. In fact, he is likely to pour praise on dictators—including anti-American ones. Toward the end of his first term, I did a roundup of his relations with dictators: here. A roundup of such relations in his second term bids to be equally full and pungent.

On his visit to China earlier this month, Trump said to Xi Jinping, “You’re a great leader,” and, “It’s an honor to be your friend.”

Xi presides over a one-party police state with a gulag (laogai). That state is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. Xi has crushed Hong Kong and threatens to swallow Taiwan. Etc.

A great citizen of China was Liu Xiaobo, the democracy leader and political prisoner. He received the Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, in 2010. He died, still a prisoner, on July 13, 2017.

On that very day, Trump said of Xi, “Well, he’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. We’ve gotten to know each other very well. A great leader. He’s a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man.” And so on.

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In 2019, as Beijing was crushing Hong Kong, many people, including some members of his own party, were imploring Trump to “stand with Hong Kong.” Said Trump, “Look, we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy.”

You have noticed this “friend of mine.” John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in the first term, addressed this matter at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit earlier this month.

Trump “thinks he’s friends with Xi Jinping and with Vladimir Putin,” said Bolton. “And I will guarantee you, that’s not how they see Trump. I think they both see him as an easy mark.”

In a 2023 interview, Trump said, “They’re all top of the line.” He was referring to Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong-un. “President Xi is a brilliant man,” said Trump. “If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find—there’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.”

Trump is consistent in this belief. In Beijing this month, he said, “If you went to Hollywood and looked for a leader of China to play a role in a movie—he’s Central Casting. You couldn’t find a guy like him.”

The first US president to go to China was Richard Nixon. “The week that changed the world,” he called it: February 21–28, 1972. Accompanying the president’s party on the trip was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative journalist. He was nauseated by what he saw.

“We have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world,” WFB wrote.

He continued, “Mr. Nixon’s appetite for a summit conference in Peking transformed the affair from a meeting of diplomatic technicians, concerned to examine and illuminate areas of common interest, into a pageant of moral togetherness at which Mr. Nixon managed to give the impression that he was consorting with Marian Anderson, Billy Graham, and Albert Schweitzer.”

When Nixon toasted “the bloodiest, most merciless chief of state in the world,” said WFB—he meant Mao—“he did so in accents most of us would reserve for Florence Nightingale.”

After this latest summit, President Trump posted a picture of himself with his Chinese counterpart, writing a caption that made him sound like an excited and awed schoolboy: “The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders!”

If Trump pours praise on anti-American dictators, he makes sure to pour scorn on American leaders who are his political opponents. Consider two examples: one from 2019, one from this month.

In May 2019, Joe Biden, kicking off his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, said, “Are we a nation that embraces dictators and tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong-un?” In retaliation, North Korea’s official “news agency” called Biden a “fool of low IQ.”

That is a favorite Trump phrase: “low IQ.”

In the White House, Trump issued a tweet, saying, “I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me”—concerning weapons—“& also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?”

During this month’s summit in Beijing, Xi Jinping mentioned the “Thucydides trap,” whereby a rising power and a declining power come to blows. Someone must have explained the implications of this statement to Trump, which prompted a tweet from him:

“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct.”

Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un may be monstrous Communist dictators, but at least they’re not “Sleepy Joe,” right?

At home, the two Trump terms have been a festival of lawlessness, vulgarity, and corruption. But our president’s sweetness on monstrous dictators may be the most painful thing about the whole ordeal.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

In 1976, Petro Ruban made a wood carving in the shape of a book. On the book’s cover was the Statue of Liberty, along with the words “200 Years.” Ruban intended the carving to be a gift to the American people on the occasion of their bicentennial. He had worked eight months on it.

The Soviet authorities, however, confiscated the carving. In short order, they confiscated the wood-carver, too. That is, they threw him into prison—again.

Ruban was not only a wood-carver, he was also a Soviet human-rights activist. More specifically, he was a Ukrainian human-rights activist. Ruban was a nationalist, believing in independence for Ukraine. This made him doubly intolerable to the Soviet state.

Today, as you can see, the Kremlin is still intolerant of Ukrainian nationhood—to the point of an all-out war of subjugation.

Last month, I wrote an article titled “People vs. Dictatorships.” I emphasized the importance of distinguishing people, or peoples, from the dictatorships that rule them. Ronald Reagan was conscientious about making this distinction.

He would often cite the cases of specific political prisoners. In 1987, he spoke to a Captive Nations conference, held at the Ukrainian National Catholic Shrine in Washington, D.C. I quoted this speech in my article last month.

Reagan talked about Petro Ruban that day. He identified him as “a prisoner in Special Regimen Labor Camp No. 36-1, one of the most notorious of the Soviet camps.” He mentioned Ruban’s Statue of Liberty carving, etc.

Reading this speech of the president’s, I got curious about Ruban. I looked into his life.

Of particular help was the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, an organization started in Soviet days. It is affiliated with the Memorial society, a project started by Andrei Sakharov and his friends in the late 1980s.

(Sakharov, you will recall, was the great physicist turned great dissident.)

The purpose of Memorial is twofold: to document atrocities of the past and to promote democracy in the present. Obviously, Putin’s Kremlin has banned Memorial, along with Russian civil society at large. But Memorial people continue to operate in exile.

In 2022, Memorial shared the Nobel Peace Prize. (For an article of mine on the 2022 prize, go here.)

Petro Vasylovych Ruban was born on January 10, 1940. His birthplace was Konotop, a city in northeastern Ukraine. It was wartime, and Ruban’s father was a fighter pilot. “For having been captured by the Nazis, he became the victim of repression by the Soviets and never returned.”

I have quoted the Kharkiv group in its sketch of Petro Ruban’s life.

Understand that Soviet prisoners of war were considered traitors by the Soviet state. Stalin himself had a son, Yakov, who was taken prisoner. “In Hitler’s camps,” said Stalin, “there are no Russian prisoners of war, only Russian traitors, and we will do away with them when the war is over.”

Stalin had his daughter-in-law, Yulia, arrested as the wife of a traitor. She was imprisoned for a year and a half, and was never the same again.

(I wrote about Stalin and his family in a book called Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.)

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Petro Ruban was first sentenced to prison in 1959, when he was 19. For the next 30 years, almost, he would be in and out of prison—mainly in. Twenty-five of those years, he spent in prison.

What were the charges against him? In a police state, this hardly matters, for the authorities will choose whatever charge seems handy. But one particular charge against Ruban is noteworthy: “bourgeois nationalism.” In other words, he favored Ukrainian independence.

In the Gulag, Ruban experienced the usual hardships and tortures. There were also periods of relief. For example, it was in prison that he learned wood-carving. In the rare years on the outside, he did such carving for a living.

Once, while in the Gulag, he helped smuggle out the prison diaries of Eduard Kuznetsov. In 1975, the New York Times published an article that said, “Kuznetsov’s diaries are the latest stunning addition to the most significant genre of contemporary Soviet letters: the prison stories and memoirs from the camps.”

When Ruban was rearrested in 1976, it was for the Statue of Liberty carving. But Andrei Sakharov guessed that there was also another reason: officials were taking revenge on Ruban for having helped Kuznetsov. (The latter man would be swapped in a prisoner exchange with the United States in 1979.)

Ruban was released from prison in 1985—but he was very soon rearrested and reimprisoned. Why? In part, because he had criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But mainly because he had applied to travel to the United States with his son, Marko, to seek medical treatment for him.

Marko, age about eleven, had been paralyzed in an accident. Ruban and his wife, Lidya, did not even have a wheelchair for him. They thought he could be helped with modern medical care in the US. But the Soviets did not take kindly to the request.

One report, published in 1988 by The Ukrainian Weekly, an exile outlet, gives a taste of Ruban’s spirit and character. Ruban “insisted that he should serve his sentence on the territory of his homeland, Ukraine.” For this and other offenses and effronteries, he was “constantly punished with solitary confinement.”

Thanks to Western pressure, Lidya and Marko were able to travel to the United States in January 1988. Reagan would travel to Moscow for a summit a few months later. Before Reagan’s arrival, in one of those gestures that became familiar in the Cold War, the Soviets released Ruban.

At the US embassy, Ruban sat next to Secretary of State George Shultz, no less.

In July of that year, 1988, Reagan gave his annual Captive Nations Week address. “Now, as you may recall, on this occasion last year, I spoke of Petro Ruban,” he said. He went on to say, “Last January, his son, Marko, was permitted to come here for medical treatment.” There was a story or two involved.

“When Marko got off the plane, his first words in his new country were, ‘I want to be able to stand on my own two feet.’ In his hands, he held something that he had labored on during the long plane trip from the Soviet Union. The boy whose father had been imprisoned for making a Statue of Liberty had embroidered Lady Liberty onto a towel.”

One more thing, from Reagan: “I’m happy to be able to tell you that Petro Ruban was released from prison and just last night arrived in this country to be reunited with his family. Petro and Marko are with us here.”

When Reagan died in 2004, Petro Ruban made a statement, which included these sentences: “I remember Reagan for his magnificent internal beauty. For me, he is the president who gave me freedom.

Ruban died in Kyiv—in independent, and not-yet-invaded, Ukraine—on September 26, 2011.

Let me ask a question: Who are the democratic leaders—the heads of state and government in the Free World—keeping an eye on political prisoners today? Speaking out for them?

Another question: Would political prisoners and other dissidents pay tribute to America today, as Petro Ruban did on the occasion of our bicentennial? We are now celebrating our 250th. Would their sons embroider the statue on towels?

There is no shortage of political prisoners to keep an eye on. In Russia, there are more political prisoners today than in the late Soviet period. Many of those prisoners are Ukrainian.

Here is one headline from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group: “Russia sentences abducted and tortured Melitopol journalists to 26 years for pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel.” Those journalists are Denys Hlushchenko and Oleksandr Malyshev. (For the article, go here.)

Here is another headline: “71-year-old Ukrainian patriot Halyna Dovhopola unbroken after 7 years in Russian captivity, but ‘won’t survive another such winter.’” (Article here.)

There is astounding bravery in the world, to go with cruelty, tyranny, and depravity. I sometimes quote José Martí, the Cuban independence leader: “When there are many men who lack honor, there are always others who have within themselves the honor of many men.”

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