Part 1 was published prior to the 2020 election.
Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Remember to thank your poll workers. If you are part of the vote-in-person community, the poll workers who assist you received training for handling a flow of voters. They also received education to call for help in the case of voter intimidation. I’m one of these poll workers.
Elections are part of our constitutional republic – citizens are responsibility for electing their representatives who govern the nation. Despite what the politics industry and pollsters would have us believe, elections do not feature rival teams where one is a winner and the other a loser. Elections as part of democracy provide a method for moving forward despite our disagreements in priorities, beliefs and level of influence.
More than anything else, our disagreements about the how and what of governance should be founded on an agreement of election integrity. What are our standards for deciding an election has integrity? Or not?
As I received training as a poll worker, I was struck by the apolitical nature of the process itself. Everyone is treated the same. People work in pairs or more, always a check for accountability and witness. The supervisors are available to answer questions. There is no discussion of the candidates, ballot measures or such allowed. Our elections are a sacred process for our democratic republic, if we protect them as such.
Why would someone profane the sacred process of elections to plant seeds of doubt? I propose that conflict profiteers – those people who make a living on dividing us – have ulterior motives. The conflict profiteers primarily seek two things: money and power. They cloak themselves in “ truthiness ” to feed our love of conspiracy theories. And it’s worked.
Conflict profiteers have struck at the core of democracy itself: our elections.
Does voter fraud exist? In very small numbers, yes. The Heritage Foundation database on voter fraud documents 62 election irregularities in 2016. In 2020, there were 17 cases. In the 2020 cases, two were about ineligible voters. The remaining 15 convictions involved forged signatures for ballot measures and other crimes to influence local elections. No evidence of presidential vote interference. None. Zero. Zip. Trump lost the election. It’s time to look forward and give up the nonsense.
It’s up to us, the citizens, to accept our responsibility to restore faith in our elections. To be helpful, to be involved and to administer the election ourselves. Across the nation, election administrators from county offices, their staff and the thousands of volunteers are stepping up. In two weeks’ time, they will dedicate themselves to a free and fair election for the rest of us.
Let’s trust each other to have good intentions. Let us trust, but verify, each action we take as election workers. Our nation depends on us. We must depend on each other.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.