Jack Schlossberg tried to be charismatic

It’s widely believed that “charisma” is an intrinsic feature of certain public figures. They either have it or they don’t. From the Greek for “gift from God,” charisma is seen as either divine grace—or, to capitalists and the manosphere, something like “animal magnetism.” Charisma is bred in the bone, a divine right, fit for a king. This is not a notion befitting a democracy.

Modern charisma can be understood best in its absence. So let’s take Hillary Clinton. It has long been an article of faith that she lacks charisma. In 2016, attraction to her by her pantsuit nation supporters could not be attributed to her charisma, which she by decree did not have; so our passion was re-described as calculation or neoliberal conformity. Surely it wasn’t possible to adore an industrious public servant. In 2016, right after she lost, I tried to write about this:

Maybe saying “I love Hillary” would have seemed culty. But people say with impunity they love Obama, the state of Israel, their churches, Kurt Cobain. In the end, I wish I’d said it because it’s true.

The Chapo left sure hazed me for that one. You evidently don’t fall for Hillary Clinton. You fall for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. So I stopped talking about Hillary’s charisma. And their charisma monopoly really worked for Trump and Sanders. Under its banner, they two can demagogue, get nothing done, colossally screw up our lives, whatever they want. But charismatic and blessed by the Almighty; all is forgiven.

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This article first appeared in The New Republic.

“What up, Council?” said the comedian J.T. Parr, greeting the Pasadena City Council in a surfer persona. Then he got to the point: “Americans are united in our hatred of data centers. They’re big, ugly water guzzlers.”

He’s right. America the Polarized has found some agreement at last. While President Trump guns it on building data centers, 71 percent of Americans oppose them, including a majority of Republicans.

In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas, Republicans are breaking with Trump and issuing stern warnings about the massive facilities that increasingly pock rural America. And now Humans First, a conservative group that says it supports an “America First AI policy,” is planning a nationwide data center protest on July 18.

Data centers are also shaping up to be a rogue issue putting torque on the midterms. South Florida Representative Byron Donalds, now a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in his state, has quietly defied the big guy, pledging to “protect Florida’s families and communities from data centers.” In one ad, he even seems to support government control of electric utilities. (Welcome to the struggle, Comrade Donalds.)

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The Irish used to call hard drinking the “good man’s failing.” Eugene O’Neill cited this handy, exculpatory framing in Long Day’s Journey into Night. “He liked his glass—it’s a good man’s failing!” says James Tyrone, the drunk.

The phrase is a multitool. It works well to pressure a woman into staying with an alcoholic husband, and tolerating the lies, assault, theft, car crashes, and child abuse that go along with it. “Good man’s failing” is more versatile than that, though. It offers up alcoholism as not just excusable but as evidence of how otherwise good a man is. The alcoholism certifies the goodness of the man.

In U.S. public life, we’ve easily adopted this Irish framework. A hard drinker, after all, is exactly who you want to have a beer with—and thus vote for. The great American have-a-beer test evidently finds perfect nominees to the Supreme Court, like Justice Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh. And great Maine Senate candidates, like Graham “very drunk and wouldn’t take no for an answer” Platner.

Adultery and lechery are good-man’s-failings of a more recent vintage. Platner has them, and Trump, of course. Rape can land them in hot water, but carousing and cheating on their wives—that makes them a good hang.

Trump was a known cheater well before he was elected in 2016. When he boasted about his sex life with Marla Maples in the tabloids, he was married to Ivana. When he raped E. Jean Carroll, he was married to Marla. And when he had a porny affair with Stormy Daniels, his third wife Melania was pregnant with their son Barron.

But even if the pussy-grabbing bugged them, voters didn’t dwell on Trump’s grotesque public humiliation of every one of his three wives.

And now there’s Graham Platner. After I post this I’ll check the news. God willing, Platner, whose vast deck of scandals now includes a solid charge of straight-up rape (with receipts), will have left the race.

It can’t come soon enough. But he’d already lost my donation when it was revealed that before he even launched his campaign, his wife, Amy Gertner, had told the team that vetted him about sexually explicit texts to several women that she’d found on his phone, last year, which was only two years after they were married.

So Platner is a man who demeans, undermines, and ritually humiliates his wife by sexting several other women at the very start of their marriage. That of course meant to me that Gertner, who should do whatever she wants, could forgive him or not; Platner himself can reform—or not. But one thing seemed beyond doubt. A man who’d betray his wife that way would betray his principles, his politics, his voters, and the state of Maine.

It turns out that the freaks who vetted Graham Platner, paying another group $6,250 for a rush background check, didn’t see it this way. They knew about the drinking. They knew he was a sex pest. And they knew he was a cheater. They just figured that cheating, like drinking and lechery and Totenkopf tattoos, could be sold as a good man’s failing.

During the height of the #MeToo project, when thousands of men were exposed for exploiting their colleagues and underlings for sex, the survivors and whistleblowers got a public hearing at last. But the wives were expected to endure their own public humiliation in private and in silence. They were even portrayed as complicit. But it turns out they had something to say about these men—and they, like Amy Gertner, knew it early.

Those who vet male candidates absolutely must make wives and girlfriends their first interviews. They are almost always the first and hardest-hit victims of male aggression and cruelty. It doesn’t matter whether they forgive cheating and even assault; marriage is its own thing. But cheaters and assailants absolutely shouldn’t run for office.

Jenny Racicot, the 41-year-old Mainer who says she survived being raped by Platner, wrote a text to a friend in 2023. She warned the friend that Platner is “consensually careless” and “doesn’t listen to you when drunk.” Consensually careless. If “good man’s failing” is man code for immoral behavior that women must tolerate, “consensually careless” is excellent code for: Avoid this man at all costs.

What Racicot doesn’t say to her friend is that, in 2023, Platner was married, or nearly so. This week Amy Gertner is finding out that her sexting husband also evidently raped someone the very year of their wedding. Let’s hope she is surrounded by friends. Let’s hope not one of them is saying rape is part of Platner’s rebel charm.

At the same time, we have all internalized the idea that drinking and cheating are charming—the foibles of fun guys with maverick politics. And while the Republicans also clearly see sexual assault as cool, the Democratic Party, which is calling on Platner to resign, must not. And so far does not. At least not yet.

P.S. He’s out!

Does America have a right to exist? And in what form?

Here are some options that came into focus this week. The first two are bleak; the last one is true and promising.

(1) America is a graveyard.

Possibly America is already dead. This is the hypothesis of Trump’s Freedom250, the non-attended, non-event for the 250th in Washington, D.C.

The photos were comical at first: poor Peter Brady with no guests at his party. Then the rained-out July 4th nothing. Trump’s truncated gibberish speech. The violent excessive fireworks, invocations not of 1776 kitsch glory but of the reckless and relentless bombing still underway in Iran and Gaza. They’ve left behind zero good cheer but plenty of air pollution and traumatized dogs.

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Sad!

Twenty-two years ago, I asked Mark Burnett, the inventor of modern reality TV, a question. “Donald Trump is a big success for you in The Apprentice. But don’t you think he’s kind of an absurd figure?”

“No,” Mark said.

“Not at all. The opposite, actually. Everyone told me: ‘My God, it’s never going to work. Why is anyone going to watch Trump?’ But I knew that Trump is very American and I’ve been around Trump enough to know that the people, as in blue-collar, regular people, adore Trump. He is a folk hero. Trump is brave. And, yeah, he might not be shy to promote himself, but the fact is the guy’s down $900 million in his own cash—and billions in others’ money— and he straightened it out. He came through.”

Burnett was a dick, but I shoulda listened. A folk hero, Trump—sigh, that tracks. And a con man with blood of ice who can lose billions in other peoples’ money and “straighten it out.”

Straighten it out? For a mega-debtor like Trump, straightening it out didn’t mean getting solvent. It meant posing as rich on TV even though he was profoundly in the red. Costumed as a glistening televangelist, out billions to unpaid workers and banks, Trump on The Apprentice passed the hat again—to the folk who made him a folk hero and to a new set of gullible banks that rolled out a red carpet of infinite credit.

(The year before I spoke to Burnett, Ivanka said in her own first reality-star turn, “There was a homeless person sitting right outside of Trump tower…And I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has 8 billion dollars more than me. Because he was in such extreme debt at the point, you know?”)

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Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958

It’s been 25 rollicking decades of high highs and low lows in this American nuthouse. So today’s the day to kick off this summer’s mixed feelings with a BIG BLAMMO SALE: GET 75% OFF A SUBSCRIPTION FOR A WHOLE YEAR OF MAGIC + LOSS!

Happy solstice! Happy 3,225th anniversary of the Olmec! And to my fellow Gen Xers: Happy 50th anniversary of the bicentennial!

get 75% off!

If America feels somehow better lately, it’s not because of the godforsaken 250th.

And it’s not just because the World Cup tourists are telling anyone who will listen that we’re all so cheery, and have sunsets and ice cubes. It’s because Trump got his worst poll yet. According to the American Research Group, only 30 percent of Americans approve of the president.

Finally. And, also according to the American Research Group, two-thirds of us actively disapprove of him. Two-thirds of us have come to our senses—what now? On Trump’s handling of the economy, it’s better news yet: Seventy percent disapprove. Look around! Seven in ten adults from sea to shining sea have eyes to see!

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This appreciation of James Gandolfini first appeared in 2013.

James Gandolfini, who died at 51 on June 19, 2013, hated Tony Soprano. The monstrously significant role that made Gandolfini’s name—over eight long seasons on HBO—nearly destroyed him. He was sickened by the violent scenes in “The Sopranos”: the ice-cold ones, the operatic ones, all of it. Ins…

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This article first appeared in The New Republic.

Hunter Biden is back, seven years drug-free, and spoiling for social media fights. He’s won kudos for his (only slightly creaky) clapbacks to his haters. “Hunter went from smoking crack to smoking MAGAs,” observed one fan last week.

Last seen advising his father to defy common sense by staying in the 2024 presidential race, Hunter is today owning his crackhead days and flexing his recovery from addiction. He’s even launched a kind of secular ministry with the hope, he says, of “giving people the space to talk about what they’re going through” and helping them see “the incredible promises they can receive if they stay the course” of recovery.

What’s novel about this coming-out is not that Biden, who has been through the wringer, now abstains from alcohol and drugs. Teetotaling in public life is extremely common. Instead, the surprise is that he’s expressing a moral ideal we haven’t seen in U.S. politics in a long, long time: a form of sobriety that is much more rigorous than mere abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

Alcoholics Anonymous, which Biden has participated in, sees sobriety as a kind of sacred condition, one contingent on much more than a person’s blood alcohol content. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to a set of moral and spiritual precepts, including honesty, humility, accountability, solidarity, and service.

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Elizabeth Strout shakes the world, hard, with one line of dialogue in her latest novel, The Things We Never Say. I’m not sure I wanted this shaking. Watch how perspective slips around through this single sentence, until the heart-stopping crash:

“When this lunatic was running for president the first time, your mother and I would watch their party’s debates, and one night he said about one of his competitors onstage with him—or maybe he said it afterward, I can’t remember—but at some point he said, ‘He looks like a girl,’ and what I remember, Rob, is that every time afterward—every time—I saw that other man I saw him as a girl.”

Is that it? That’s it, I think. That’s why the country is Trump’s, and why it brims with hate. Somehow, way back in the Republican primary debates, we were sentenced to live in his cranium, behind his eyes, and now we see as he does, we see with his contempt.

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My son Ben’s friend Declan at Delaney Hall this week

Will we have a youth uprising in the U.S.?

I don’t mean a set of campaigns focused on idealistic goals. A real youth coup. A movement that mobilizes the young of all races, genders, classes, and even ideologies to protest the old.

These bacchanals look romantic in retrospect. They blend private longing and public possibility; they are emotive, fierce, unfocused, cathartic, festive, erotic, twisted. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven,” wrote Wordsworth in “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement”—before expressing horror at what the Revolution wrought. The holy agenda of a youth movement, following Baudelaire, is to shock the bourgeoisie.

But blissful activism can turn violent and druggy, and feature horrifying sexual abuse, notably child rape. (See: May 68 hero Daniel Cohn-Bendit.) Heed it well, ye youngs: Boomers began in a youth movement.

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Dope lost at the pro-doping Enhanced Games

This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

Here and there, it was a good week for humanity—or “magnificas humanitas,” as Pope Leo XIV calls us poor featherless bipeds.

On May 25, the pope published his encyclical letter “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” It made a stern but loving case against AI fatalism, reminding humans of our intrinsic worth and cautioning against seeking transcendence in tech rather than grace.

But the human person got another boost in late May. It came from a less holy figure too: Peter Thiel, net worth $28 billion.

As the founder of omnipresent MAGA AI surveillance machine Palantir and longtime student of the Antichrist, Thiel didn’t mean to help out humanity. Benevolence is not his strong suit. He’s out to live forever and build a master race. But by failing to make the case for transhumanism with his much-hyped Enhanced Games, a pro-doping sports event, Thiel accidentally showcased what’s magnificent about humanity.

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“Avoid the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data.”

— Pope Leo XIV, MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The cultural trauma inflicted by AI may determine the future every bit as much as AI itself.

For two years, the public story of AI was a middle-class romance, characterized by the seduction of provincials by fawning chatbots. Some 30 percent of American adults admitted they’d formed intimate bonds with AI in 2025.

But this year has become the year of human-robot death-match, as youth-led anti-AI activism has superseded antifa as the inchoate movement that most terrifies law-enforcement agencies. A report by the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau obtained by WIRED and published this week foresees widespread social upheaval. “The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity.”

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Cornel West

Having discussed at length the sinister and fatuous ideas that sterilized American minds during the long intellectual Dust Bowl of neoliberalism, I keep promising to give you some of the good ones. It’s high time. We were deprived of numberless interesting philosophies because of the broadly successful efforts to shunt real intellectuals off the main stage by the global kleptos who prefer reheated fascism to actual mental challenges. I will finally make good on this promise.

The following ideas come from the humanities and social sciences, fields that don’t stake claims to absolute truth, unlike science or pseudoscience or microeconomics or god help us “business.” From the social sciences, I have excluded mainstream economics, which, in 1969, having suffered from acute physics envy after conservatives were left high and dry by the thrilling poetry of Marx and Keynes, started awarding themselves the Nobel in “Economic Sciences,” and thus graduated out of the debate, irony, dialectic, grace, collegiality, humor, and good faith of the great eternal philosophical discourses; pretended thenceforth to be math; and began anointing as infallible high priests blowhards with Epstein ties (Larry Summers, et al.).

The good ideas I will put in bold and call theories, lest they be mistaken for pieties. The first such theory comes from philosophy, notably the homegrown American philosophy of pragmatism.

Pragmatism’s modern exponents include Cornel West and the late Richard Rorty. Pragmatism is deeply American. It involves, above all, a hard separation of ecstatic private religion and communal public responsibility. Private religion can mean houses of worship, if you like, but also poetry, dialects, self-invention, kinks, and the spontaneous or diligent crystallization of one’s being in language or art. Public responsibility includes the forming of solidarity with a broad base of your fellows to reduce suffering in the world. No effort is made by the pragmatist to marry her private and public projects. To paraphrase Matthew 22:21: Render unto the soul the things that belong to the soul, and unto the community the things that belong to the community.

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Auld Lang Syne

Stephen Colbert is just a good guy. He has a warm heart and clear vision. He also has the right enemies. I’ll miss his show, and I’ll never forgive the people who captured CBS, took it to Vichy, and killed it.

Twenty-four years ago, in 2002, I wrote a piece about Stephen Colbert for Slate. He was then a cub reporte…

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This piece first appeared in The New Republic.

When the memory-holing of Joe Biden’s successes gets too stupid, I consult the October 19, 2024, issue of The Economist. That’s the cover that declared Biden’s post-pandemic economic turnaround “the envy of the world.” The American economy, the richly detailed article went on, was “bigger and better than ever”—ever—and “has left the rest of the rich world in the dust.”

That was a cool 18 months ago. But then came this innocent question: “Will politics bring it back to Earth?” America’s pervy politics did not disappoint. Back to earth the economy plummeted—and then lower still, into the current Trumpian basement. As of late April, Americans feel worse off economically than we have in the last 25 years.

Remember when 16 Nobel Prize–winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, signed a letter warning that Donald Trump would fire up inflation? “Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” they wrote. “Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.” They were right. But that was the summer that God was stumping for freshly felonious Trump. Screw the brainiacs. JD Vance waved away their predictions in his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz. Economists, Vance said, “have Ph.D.s, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom.”

Vibes, then. Hunches. Vance added, “We’re going to get back to that commonsense wisdom so that you can afford to live the American dream again.”

And so, just weeks after both the Economist report and Vance’s dismissal of all of economics, American voters put Trump back in the White House, where in short order he crashed the U.S. economy like a SpaceX rocket.

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Intellectual fraud Diederik Stapel. People still cite him.

Back in Obama days, Diederik Stapel was a Dutch psychologist of enormous clout. But he got rich and famous by inventing studies. Just making them up. On the upside, he told The New York Times after he got caught, he is tall, charming, and handsome.

The ruling class loved Stapel’s studies in those days. The entirely fake research told the neoliberal world, which was then drunk on market fixes for social woes, what they longed to hear. That racism could be averted if public spaces were tidied up. That individuals could overcome selfishness if they changed their diets.

Happily, these nifty tricks that could be shared like gummies on Facebook were backed by Stapel’s science. What’s more, they were published in Science. Science science science. Truth. To read them was to feel relief. No need for the tedium of democracy or racial justice, or some larcenously expensive investment in public health or education.

Stapel made it all up. He didn’t just fudge data. He didn’t do his experiments at all.

Unlike most American frauds, Stapel didn’t counterpunch when he was exposed. He admitted everything and collapsed in despair. “I have fallen from my throne — I am on the floor,” he told the Times. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself.”

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The other day I spoke to Greg Sargent at “The Daily Blast” about MAGA as an end-stage cult. The evidence that we’re at an end? The monuments. They recall the statue of an Egyptian pharaoh that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about in his great 1817 sonnet “Ozymandias.”

Trump turns 80 in two months. He’s polling at 36 percent. Popularity is fickle, and health, mental acuity, and life itself are leaving him. This is terrible news for a tyrant. Without his mind or the confidence of the American people, Trump and his hangers-on are making ever more outlandish moves to shore up his authority. Having fallen short of every measure of human merit, Trump can, in his monuments, at least, seem undefeated and deathless. The hope is to set him quite literally in stone.

The plans are pharaonic in scale—more than pharaonic. The Arc de Trump is designed at 250 feet tall, kitted out with a gold-winged Lady Liberty, four un-American gilded lions, and a flock of hideous 24-foot golden eagles. It would stand twice as high as the Lincoln Memorial. It would cost $100 million, some from American taxpayers.

The plan is despised by the people of the United States. The Trump-toady Commission of Fine Arts received more than 1,000 comments on the proposal. “One hundred percent” of respondents opposed the project, said Thomas Luebke, the commission’s secretary.

But—did you hear how big it is? And how immortal?

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Get ready with me while we talk about Ashley St. Clair.

Ashley St. Clair is a gonzo MAGA influencer turned gonzo ex-MAGA influencer who is also known for having mothered a child with Elon Musk in 2023. She is a college student. She is 27.

For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: “I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain.” Now she is ready to “talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA” and “speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is.”

Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality.

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There are unseen forces that act, there is a spiritual realm, and we are subject to those forces for good and bad. — Tucker Carlson

Why are so many men so dazzled by Donald Trump? This, rather than any query into Trump himself, may be the question of our time. It’s certainly the question for Tucker Carlson, my longtime nemesis, who has at last turned on Trump.

I wish he’d been asked this question more directly in the recent interview with him in The New York Times.

As I’ve written before, the world’s catastrophe is not Trump so much as the legions of people who act in his name. Psychiatrists sometimes speak of sociopaths like Trump as “patient-makers.” For every Donald Trump there are a half-dozen people like Tucker who end up acting out, despairing, or going to therapy because they’ve had the grave misfortune of encountering him. Trump and his ilk are thus cash cows for shrinks. These men’s addled children, wives, coworkers, and underlings will, when addled enough, beat a path to the therapist’s door.

Trump types then become specters that haunt therapy, looming large in the anguish and misery of a therapist’s paying clients. Trump surely haunts other people’s therapy this way. He’s haunted a session or ten of mine.

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