Paterno, a former quarterbacks coach for Penn State University, ran for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 2014 and consults on a variety of issues.
“I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am more concerned to know what his grandson will be.” – Abraham Lincoln
Earlier this month I was onboard a ship returning to dock in Bayonne, N.J. As the sun was rising to the east the ship was heading into New York Harbor under the Verrazzano-Narrrows Bridge. To the west was Staten Island and beyond that New Jersey. To the east as Brooklyn passed, the harbor opened up to Manhattan’s soaring skyline.
My mind wandered to moments long ago that reside in my very own DNA, and in the DNA of countless others in America. So many millions of us are descended from immigrants that came to the United States, from across the ocean and through New York.
Their minds were both full of doubt, but also with the wonder of that era’s New York skyline. It was the first landmark of a nation that represented a place of promise where they believed tomorrow could be anything they wanted it to be.
Certainly, the dreams they held met reality for many. Each dawn marked new challenges, but also a chance to move towards a greater future for themselves and their families.
The promise of opportunity beckoned my ancestors here to imagine and create a reality beyond life’s hardships in rural northern Europe, or rural southern Italy or the crowded slums of Naples.
Some stayed in Manhattan, some moved across the East River to Brooklyn, some moved to Western Pennsylvania. They were working people, barbers, coal miners, teamsters and laborers. They worked to find a way forward for their children and grandchildren.
The arc wasn’t always upward, but over time and across generations hopes became realities. Most of their stories are lost to us now. But their lives are among the millions of threads that form the rich tapestry of the American story, a story both unique and exceptional among all the nations of the world.
Exceptional? Yes. Perfect? No.
There are dark threads among America’s tapestry; among them oppression, discrimination and violent intimidation doled out to every new wave of arrivals. No threads stand more starkly than slavery’s hold on our nation’s founding.
And even after Emancipation, a long line of people were discriminated against because they were identifiable by skin color, or religion or a last name.
Each generation’s immigrants faced hurdles in the journey to a better life. The attacks were even more bitter to Black people whose ancestors were brought here by force. Images of fire hoses, attack dogs, beatings and lynching haunt the collective memory of our soul.
But still people came to this country drawn by hope. And on that morning heading into New York Harbor, I thought of our family’s own story. Humble roots and a history whose glory belongs to our ancestors. We, the living, owe the possibilities of our life to the risks they took.
That is the truth for so many of us. The people before us built a great if imperfect nation, but an ascendent one always fighting its own flaws. The arc of our nation’s journey has been to strengthen our nation, it has been to identify our wrongs and to correct them. Even to the point of a long and bloody Civil War to free millions of souls wrongly enslaved and to bind the divisions that threatened to rend this nation forever.
But now all these decades later what have we become as a nation? Are we more united and welcoming than people were in the 1800s? Are what we deem to be irrational fears of time passed now banished from our nation today? Are we still headed to the more perfect union spoken and written about centuries ago?
There is some reason for doubt.
Discrimination is no longer banished to the shadows. Talk of civil war and secession is overt. Some openly seek to limit the right to vote in ways that will ensure they regain and retain power. Some conjure outrageous lies seeking to destroy the faith in our system of elections, in the free press and in our government.
Some manipulate the minds of people through fear tactics we’ve seen used as societies descend into authoritarian rule.
One wonders, how the ghosts of our past look down upon us now. Do they want to warn us of how readily some among us are willing to cast their sacrifices aside for personal gain in both financial wealth and the retention of power? Will our descendants call us heroes, for defending the country that allows them to reach their dreams?
The ghosts of our Founders would likely remind today’s originalists that the founding documents were masterpieces of their times, but also unfinished and imperfect. Slaveholding hands were among those who wrote and signed them. Indeed, a young Thomas Jefferson himself acknowledged their own failings:
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
We have a complicated history but one of proud people who have always pointed hopefully towards the promise of tomorrow. As a nation we must rise to the opportunities and blessings they gave us. But so too, we must rise above our imperfections on an inevitable march towards a more perfect union.
But we face a precarious time.
Hate and division are being sown in weak minds by people who profit from the bitter fruits of the orchards of wrath and darkness. That crop will poison us all.
Looking back it is hard to imagine the courage they summoned to come here, or the courage necessary for those brought here in slavery to build a family history that endures today.
Once again, we in America will need the courage to stand up to passions inflamed and armed unlike any other developed country on earth. It will take courage to reform or repudiate the liars, deniers and those bigoted against others’ race, gender, religion or sexuality. In America there can be no safe harbor to anchor their hatred or their false gospels of division and denunciation.
From my own family history come the words of Angelo Paterno, a grandfather who died long before I was born. He dropped out of high school, fought in World War I and finished his high school, college and law education at night. In the 1940s he was already fighting for religious and racial harmony.
In an October 1945 speech he stated:
“We must have unity of thought. We must have unity of action. We must all act as missionaries and we must preach to our fellow men, night and day, the evils of this hydra-headed monster of bigotry. The forces of intolerance and hate are on the march today. The seed of hate and discord is being sown all around us. It is our task to indicate our worthy ideals into the warped minds of the weakling before this seed takes root.”
It was a courageous stand at a time when his opinions were running ahead of history’s pace of change. It is time for that grandfather to see what we will be. It is time for our nation, like Lincoln stated, to be concerned with what we will be as descendants of the people whose courage built the nation we call home.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.