“Make America Great Again,” the dominant slogan in the recent presidential campaign, doesn’t deal with what makes America great in the first place. My wife and I just returned from a trip on which we could viscerally feel what makes our nation great. We visited a 172.5-acre field in Coleville-du-Mer, France, with rows of white marble Latin crosses or Stars of David stretching across a breathtaking landscape. The graves mark the U.S. military cemetery on bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach, the site of the deadliest battle on D-Day, the audacious American attack that freed Europe from the grip of a madman. They also memorialize the values of sacrifice and courage that led Americans from all walks of life to set aside complacency, take up arms, and do the right thing.

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With an overstuffed philosophical armoire of extremists, Trump created a Fibber McGee-style Cabinet that contains everything from sexual predators to someone who endorses a conspiracy theory that airplane exhaust is a plot to poison America. They are about to come tumbling out with a cacophony of noise in congressional confirmation hearings that will probably make Fibber McGee look like a neatnik. Although the national press will no doubt obsess with the noise the nominees generate in congressional hearings, the candidates that deserve most of the scrutiny are those who may not be thoroughly questioned by anyone. 

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Jeff Bezos’s essay published in the Washington Post exposes how billionaires and many press critics don’t really understand the mission of the craft in which they invest their money and critical energy. Journalism is not — and never was — a popularity contest designed to get good ratings. In fact, if journalists are doing their job well, they will anger or lose some members of their audiences. In short, they won’t poll well, and they shouldn’t. The real issue is if their exposés and stories improve things and stand the test of time.

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Alia Ibrahim’s story published In Darajreads like an insightful letter about life, death and hope in the eye of strife; it gives you a sense of place, a taste of being there, an objective take on what’s happening in a war from someone who lives with the threat of death on her doorstep. It is a raw, gripping account of life in a place where hope struggles to overcome heartbreak.  “In times of war,” Alia writes, “death comes in confusing forms: My own world is safe,” she says, sharing that her immediate family and colleagues at work are safe. “I know there is still a risk of being on the wrong road at the wrong moment,” she says, “But that’s something I can ignore. Death is something I am reminded of every minute of the day.”

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In stark contrast to the larger papers’ failure to endorse a candidate for president, Art Cullen, a crusading editor who publishes a newspaper in the heart of Republican country in Iowa, told Times-Pilot readers in no uncertain terms where the paper stood — and why — under a big, bold headline that read: “Editorial: Harris for President.” The strong editorial by Cullen, who owns the paper along with his brother, John, stands in sharp contrast to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post,.and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times. Bezos and Soon-Shiong decided to quit backing individual presidential candidates.

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In targeting his critics — real and imagined — as enemies, Trump joins a dubious throng of zealots who have whipped up public hysteria with the idea that some of their fellow citizens are “enemies of the people.” Trump even threatens to use the military against his critics, a prospect the nation’s military generally abhors. Many in Trump’s Republican cult dismiss his dark charges as campaign bluster. He usually airs them during his favored venue, political rallies, where reporters can’t press him on exactly what he is talking about. When he does interviews, he picks friendly news entertainers at the Fox network, where he is rarely challenged about anything. America has dealt with this kind of thing before, though, and it’s serious and dangerous. If history is any guide — and it usually is — Trump’s fiery rhetoric can become destructive and erode faith in the institutions Americans depend upon to keep the nation healthy and safe. Americans should take him seriously.

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We face another election in which the issue that caused or worsened the Great Depression — tariffs — is on the table. I know this subject is not as sexy as a Taylor Swift endorsement in this contentious and vital election. Yet these tariffs — which basically amount to sales taxes — can’t get enough news coverage. Tariffs are a crucial policy that could impact inflation just as significantly as the bout of rising prices now tapering off in America. Both candidates for the White House toy with tariffs. Voters need facts not fiction on an issue that could impact the pocketbooks of Republicans and Democrats alike. Tariffs have a rich history in America. They’ve been part of the nation’s story since its earliest days, generating everything from job protection and economic slumps to trade wars.

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A year ago I left Israel, in early October, three days before the brutal Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and captured 250 hostages, triggering a tragic war that continues today. Who would have imagined it would last this long? I made the trip as board chair of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), a U.S. government-owned system of Arab language news outlets designed to bring unbiased news to a part of the world where governments or their cronies control most news organizations. I resigned from that position recently.  My trip took me to six countries I had visited before as a working journalist, but this time was different. I returned to America with changed views about the Middle East. I had arrived in the region as a strong supporter of Israel and its people. I returned thinking America must forge a more balanced posture toward the Arab and the Jewish people, despite my anger at Hamas’ horrific attack on innocent people.

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The latest wave of misinformation by Trump and his MAGA allies involves false reports that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is ignoring the plights of communities suffering catastrophic flood damage from Hurricane Helene. In fact, governors and mayors of the communities involved, both Republican and Democrat, say that’s not true. To the contrary, they’ve been thanking federal officials and the Biden administration for the swift reaction the the tragedies they face. I’m not going to get into why a candidate for public office would make such dire pronouncements. That would take me into the dangerous terrain of motives and, as a journalist, I’m not qualified to probe the mischievous mazes of the mind created by a lust for power.

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Elon Musk promotes himself as an avatar of free speech on X, the platform he runs that used to be Twitter. But I wonder if Mr .Musk and his operation are what James Madison had in mind when he spearheaded the drive that codified free speech in the First Amendment? The First Amendment to the Constitution is aptly named for being the most important. I share that sentiment. Its’ wording is a bit out-of-step for a world where most people get their news from X or TikTok or some other social media platform. Nevertheless, the amendment’s meaning is as vital as when Virginia became the required eleventh state to ratify the nation’s Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791. The vote seared into law the basic rights that distinguish America from any nation across the globe.

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Polls suggest the economy remains the top issue for voters in the coming election, and what happened at the Federal Reserve Wednesday will have a far more immediate impact on voters than the vague economic policies that both candidates for the White House embrace in their campaigns. Both former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris tout budgetary game plans containing holes as big as Yankee Stadium. Neither, for instance, detail how they will finance the tax cuts they embrace without increasing the soaring national debt, which has surged under Republican and Democratic administrations over the past decade or two. Indeed, the decision by Jerome Powell and his six colleagues on the Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rates by one-half percent will impact how much American voters pay to buy everything from cars and homes to the returns they earn on their savings and the interest charges on credit cards. The effects are immediate.

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The distraction duo is in full swing and floundering. Donald Trump is saying he will nominate his new soulmate, Elon Musk, to lead a government efficiency commission if the former president is elected in November. The announcement demonstrates something more sinister: Both men excel at floating attention-grabbing stories in the media to distract the public from other more serious problems they would rather not discuss. Trump’s troubles involve the burden of deflecting attention from the wobbly footings of his White House campaign. He’s now the old guy in the race, pining for the days he was running against Joe Biden. The last thing he wants is for anyone to focus on the same signs of cognitive decline that drove Biden to drop out and endorse Kamala Harris, his Vice President and the younger candidate in the race.

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The Republican Party has converted the voter suppression operation it clumsily tried in the last presidential election into a more polished fraudulent scheme that could mean the 2024 election won’t be over with a vote count. Democratic political operatives, caught off guard by the sophistication of a low-profile GOP voter suppression movement, recently created Democracy Defenders, a Super PAC led by Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign manager in 2012. Messina has raised $10 million to fight Republican efforts to deny the vote to vulnerable populations that favor Democrats. You probably haven’t heard too much about this in the news. The action has evolved out of the spotlight in courthouses and esoteric state offices that are lightly covered because local media that once reported on this kind of news barely exists anymore.

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That Harris' nomination to the top of the ticket came in Chicago is apt. The city is the most American of all metropolises with its diverse mosaic of Polish, Latino, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Black, and White neighborhoods that are greater than the sum of the parts. The roots of most Chicagoans trace to immigrants just like the ones who are a major campaign issue for Harris and her opponent. Like any candidate for public office, Harris can learn many lessons from the city of grit and hustle. She was nominated in a place that has played a central role in shaping the nation’s constantly changing political narrative, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The Democratic Convention of 2024 marked the twenty-sixth time a political party has gathered in the city to nominate someone for the highest office in the land. The promise and peril that often started in Chicago demonstrate how things that start well don’t always end that way.

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One sign all’s not well in the AI world: the recent stock market rout in which traders bailed from high-flying tech stocks like Nividia, fearful that AI mania obscenely inflated the true value of the maker of chips needed for AI. There are other signs of trouble, too. Fake news stories in the media are nothing new. Stories with doctored photos and text have been around since the days of yellow journalism popularized by icons like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The Wall Street Journal’s reporters found that AI takes fake news to a new level, making it “trivially easy to splice together clips and write and voice scripts at little cost.”

“Anyone with five dollars and a credit card can do this,” Jack Stubbs, chief intelligence officer of the research firm Graphika, told the Journal’s reporters.

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The consensus about Trump’s false comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’ ethnicity that came up during a recent lunch I had with a group of Chicago political pros. Together, they have decades of experience running, writing about, and working on campaigns ranging from aldermanic and mayoral races all the way up the political food chain. Trump appeared before Black journalists in Chicago and accused Vice President Kamala Harris of suddenly discovering her Black roots to bolster her White House campaign, a patently false allegation. Harris has long and proudly touted her Black and Asian heritage in many campaigns. She’s no Black-come-lately. The question that surfaced over salads and drinks at a local pub was this: Did Trump’s insulting remarks amount to a slip of the tongue or a calculated comment designed to divert attention from his age?

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“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his social media platform. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they are saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” The Heritage Foundation, too, denies any ties between its blueprint and the Trump ticket. It says it has produced a conservative wish list for the next president, regardless of who wins the election. Many critics don’t buy Trump's or Heritage’s claims, though, and for good reasons. First, how can Trump call some of the project’s proposals “abysmal” if he “knows nothing” about it? Trump also has a problem with the pen of his running mate, J. D. Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee wrote a forward to a book entitled “Dawn’s Early Light Taking Back Washington to Save America” by Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and prime force behind the mandate.

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If history is a guide, Harris faces a steep climb. Of the nation’s forty-nine vice presidents, only four have been elected president. Nine vice presidents lost elections to succeed the president under which they served only after their presidents died, were assassinated or resigned, as President Richard Nixon did in 1974. Succeeding the boss is not impossible. The pundits considered Vice President Harry Truman a long shot to defeat Thomas Dewey in 1948. But Truman traveled over 22,000 miles by rail delivering speeches. Running against the Republican-controlled "do-nothing" eightieth Congress, Truman resonated with many voters dissatisfied with partisan gridlock. Sound familiar? He scored a historic political comeback to become the nation’s thirty-third president.

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The Oxford Dictionary defines dementia as a “condition characterized by progressive or persistent loss of intellectual functioning, especially with impairment of memory and abstract thinking, and often with personality change, resulting from organic disease of the brain.” I doubt that any doctor would officially diagnose either President Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the former president and convicted felon trying to unseat Biden, with dementia yet. But both candidates display the creeping signs of cognitive decline characteristic of almost anyone who lives to be eighty-one or seventy-eight, the respective ages of the candidates. And they are running for a four-year term in which cognitive decline could easily slip into dementia.

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James Franklin, elder brother of Benjamin Franklin, launched the nation’s first newspaper crusade as the editor of the New England Courant, one of the few American newspapers that existed in 1721. Fast forward to 2024 and we see another crusade, even if it’s not called one: The New York Times’s drive to convince President Biden that he’s no longer up to the job. The crusading newspaper is a fixture of the nation’s media landscape as old as America and the Stars and Stripes. The campaigns can be wrong on facts, misguided, or even unscrupulous, but they usually embody the voice in the room that few want to hear.

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