In this episode of the Politics in Question podcast, the team discusses thermostatic politics to explain what it means and how it works.
Podcast: What is thermostatic politics?


In this episode of the Politics in Question podcast, the team discusses thermostatic politics to explain what it means and how it works.

American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost presides over his first Holy Mass as Pope Leo XIV with cardinals in the Sistine Chapel at the conclusion of the Conclave on May 09, 2025 in Vatican City, Vatican.
The Vice President has stepped into the fray between the President and Pope Leo. For those of you who have not been following this, Pope Leo has been critical of various things that Trump has said regarding his war with Iran, including his statement that he was ready to wipe out the civilization. In response, Trump called Pope Leo too liberal and easy on crime. He also said that the Pope was only elected because he was an American, in response to Trump having been elected President. In response, the Pope said that he had no fear of the Trump administration and that his job was to preach the gospel. He said in response to Secretary of War Hegseth's invoking the name of Jesus for support in battle, that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
Into this exchange steps the Vice President, who says he thinks the Pope should stick to "matters of morality" and let the President of the United States dictate American public policy. The Vice President obviously doesn't understand the meaning of morality and its scope.
"Morality" is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a system of moral conduct, conformity to ideals of right human conduct, or virtue. "Moral", in turn, is defined as the principles of right and wrong in human behavior. "Virtue" is defined as morally good behavior or character.
How do we as a society define what is right and wrong in human behavior? For most of man's history, that standard has been defined by religion, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or other religions. Whether the voice is that of God, Jesus, Mohammed, or the Buddha, each has set the standard for right and wrong behavior towards one's fellow man. And those standards have, in most respects, been virtually identical.
The 10 Commandments are a prime example of religion defining right and wrong behavior. The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is a principle underlying all the world's great religions.
The Pope is thus an ideal person to make statements on human behavior and morality. What are some of Trump's statements?
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” (this on Easter Sunday)
These are statements that the Pope, as Pope, has every right and responsibility to speak out against. As he said, he will continue to speak "out loudly on the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do.” Further, he said, "Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there's a better way."
This is sticking to "matters of morality." The Vice President needs to restudy his catechism. He also needs to understand that the United States was founded on the Enlightenment's principles of morality, as stated in the Declaration of Independence:
"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—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men."
When Trump dictates American public policy that is contrary to the essence of America's founding principles, then he is not jut being immoral, he is leading the country in a very un-American way.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com

U.S. President Donald Trump walks off Air Force One at Miami International Airport on April 11, 2026 in Miami, Florida. President Trump came to town to attend a UFC Fight.
There has been no shortage of evidence of Trump's grandiosity. See my article, "Trump, The Poster Child of a Megalogamiac." But now comes new evidence of his delusion of grandeur that is even worse.
Recently, on his Truth Social media account, he posted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus healing the sick, apparently in part response to Pope Leo's rebuking of the U.S. (Hegseth) for invoking the name of Jesus for support in battle, saying Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them,” together with a diatribe against Pope Leo in another post saying he was very liberal, liked crime, and was only elected because Trump had been elected..
Here is the image he posted:
There can be no question that this is an image of Trump as Jesus. After receiving critical backlash about the post, he said he thought that it was an image of him as a doctor healing the sick. A bad excuse may be better than none, but really!
Trump clearly thinks of himself as the man who can do no wrong, the brightest person in the world, a king, a master of the universe. There are no rules that apply to him. As he said in a New York Times interview, the only thing that will prevent him from doing something is his own mind.
What do we do if the leader of our country is deranged? If we had a government led by responsible men and women, not a bunch of toadies, it would be past time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This Amendment provides that if the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet secretaries (or such other body as Congress shall provide) state that the President is no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of his office, then the Vice President shall assume the role of Acting President.
This was meant to deal with the situation of a physically ailing President who can no longer perform his duties but will not say so voluntarily. There was talk of this during Biden's presidency, both informally by Democrats and openly by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. But this circumstance should also apply to a psychic inability.
When someone lives in an alternate reality, does not understand the difference between fact and fiction, and has delusion of grandeur such that he takes no counsel from those around him, that person is not able to discharge his duties and powers as President. His ultimate duty being, as stated in his oath, to protect the Constitution and, by implication, defend our country.
Since this will not happen with the current Cabinet in place or the current Congress, the country has no choice but to bide its time till this year's mid-term elections and elect a Democratic-controlled House and Senate that will prevent Trump from pursuing many of his objectives. And also impeach Trump and remove him from office.
Never in the history of the United States have we had in the office of the President a man who so grotesquely is the very opposite of the type of person who has historically held that office and the opposite of what the people have historically wanted.
Yes, Trump was fairly elected by both a majority of the electoral college and a majority (albeit small) of the voting public. He clearly spoke to the pain that many people had been feeling and who had lost faith in the Democratic Party's interest in helping them. Whatever Democrats had done historically to support the working class was irrelevant to them, and rightfully so.
It is the Democratic Party that created the circumstances that provided Trump with an opportunity to exploit; they neglected the middle class as it was sinking. And it is the Democrats who must regain the trust of the middle class, as I have previously written. See my recent article, "The Democratic Party - Missing in Action," and my article, "Where Is the Democratic Party's Clarion Voice?"
Trump is Trump, and he will remain so. And his core base will not lose their faith in him; they have too much of themselves invested in him. It is up to Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who are disabused of Trump to right the listing ship of our country and free us from this madman.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban salutes supporters at the Balna center in Budapest during a general election in Hungary, on April 12, 2026.
Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend.
Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail or is failing to get his works published.” This was simply not true. The still young regime had already imprisoned, tortured or executed scores of intellectuals. (Sontag later recanted.)
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez still talk about Nordic countries as if we have much to learn from them, despite the fact the Nordic model heavily depends on taxing the poor and middle class, not soaking the rich. Now, distinctions matter. The Nordic systems are democratic and decent. Cuba is a Marxist basket case and police state. But the one thing uniting both fan clubs is the tendency to see the countries they imagine them to be rather than the reality.
President Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance (most recently while campaigning for Orban) have all lavished praise on Hungary. Patrick Deneen, a leading New Right intellectual, saw in Orban’s Hungary “a model of a form of opposition to contemporary liberalism that says, ‘There’s a way in which the state and the political order can be oriented to the positive promotion of conservative policies.’ ”
The Heritage Foundation, a once respected conservative think tank that has shed its devotion to the Constitution and traditional conservatism, agrees. Its wayward president, Kevin Roberts, in 2024 called Orban’s Hungary a “model for conservative governance.”
This mirrors Orban’s own explanation: “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed,” he explained in 2014. “And so in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”
Don’t be put off by the word “liberal” here (or by Deneen’s and Roberts’ tendentious use of “conservative”). Orban and his fans aren’t talking about mere left-wing policies. The “liberal” here is the liberalism of liberal democratic capitalism, John Locke, Adam Smith and the American founding fathers.
“Checks and balances is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt,” Orban claimed. Checks and balances is not actually an American invention. But it is a vital liberal bulwark against authoritarianism and corruption.
When the U.S. Supreme Court said that President Biden couldn’t, on a whim, forgive student loan debt or ban evictions, or when it ruled that Trump couldn’t unilaterally tariff the world or indiscriminately deploy troops to American cities, that was checks and balances at work.
Claims that Orban was an authoritarian could be overblown. But he was moving in that direction, larding the courts, universities and state media with political loyalists and, until this weekend, rewriting the election laws to stay in power.
But his corruption was not exaggerated, and his corruption is why he lost. Orban steered state resources to his cronies, family and hometown friends on a massive scale. But that doesn’t mean he broke the law. He wrote — or interpreted with the help of crony judges — the law to make favoritism legal. That sort of favoritism, it turns out, is incredibly bad for the economy because it distorts the market, misallocates scarce resources for self-serving political objectives and discourages investment. It’s fine to say Orban lost because the Hungarian economy and healthcare system were a mess. But that mess stemmed from Orban’s corruption.
In America we tend to think of corruption as illegal; taking bribes, pilfering taxpayer money, etc. But in many parts of the world that’s neither illegal nor even corrupt. It’s the way business is done. In many developing countries — and for most of human history — government is run like a family business. Special treatment for relatives and allies is natural. What’s unnatural is the modern liberal way of putting contracts out to bid and treating taxpayer money as sacrosanct.
No country is perfect at this. Which is one reason we have checks and balances. Each branch is supposed to be on the lookout for abuses by the others, and everyone is supposed to be subordinate to the rule of law, not the law of rulers.
Orbanism is not a new model, or “wave of the future.” It was a tide of the past. And it’s good news that it’s receding.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

An NBC News live feed airs a clip from U.S. President Donald Trump's Truth Social video announcement in the White House James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on February 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Israel had launched an attack on Iran Saturday morning.
Ninety minutes before his own deadline expired, President Trump agreed to pause his threatened strikes on Iran. The ceasefire was real. The relief was understandable. And none of it changes what happened.
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s deadline, the President of the United States threatened to destroy “every” bridge and power plant in Iran. He warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." He said Iran “can be taken out” in a single night. These were not the ravings of a fringe provocateur. They were statements of declared intent from the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth, broadcast to the world.
Legal experts were unambiguous. More than 100 lawyers and legal scholars signed an open letter through Just Security, warning that intentional strikes on civilian infrastructure violate international humanitarian law. The International Committee of the Red Cross issued a public statement: “Deliberate threats, whether in rhetoric or in action, against essential civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities must not become the new norm in warfare.” The New York Times, citing historians and former U.S. officials, noted that no recent American president had spoken so openly about committing potential war crimes. Charli Carpenter, a professor of political science and legal studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned that if Trump followed through, lower-ranking service members, and not the president, would bear the greatest legal exposure.
Trump’s own response to this legal consensus was telling. Asked directly at a White House press conference whether his threats amounted to war crimes, Trump answered: “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” When a New York Times reporter raised the Geneva Conventions specifically, Trump responded, “I hope I don’t have to do it,” and then attacked the paper’s credibility. Press Secretary Leavitt, asked whether the president might use nuclear weapons, said: “Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do.” Secretary of State Rubio walked away from the same question. This was not an aberration. The administration had already been firing the top uniformed legal officers known as judge advocates general and repeatedly circumventing traditional routes for military legal advice, dismantling the institutional guardrails designed to prevent exactly this kind of threat before it was ever made.
That is not a democracy with functioning guardrails. That is a democracy in the middle of a stress test it may be failing.
Congress has been in recess since March 27. As Trump threatened to eradicate 90 million people, most lawmakers concluded the wisest response was silence. Speaker Johnson declined to comment while colleagues posted about Easter egg rolls and frosty weather back home. Only one House Republican, Rep. Nathaniel Moran of Texas, publicly objected: “I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’ That is not who we are.” Rep. Don Bacon called it “negotiating Trump style — reckless words,” but said he wanted to see the regime buckle. Rep. Ted Lieu, a senior House Democrat, went further, calling on the Pentagon not to obey any orders to eradicate a “whole civilization” and warning troops directly: “If you commit war crimes, the next Administration will prosecute you.” Democrats erupted — former Speaker Pelosi called for invoking the 25th Amendment, ranking members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees called the threats a war crime, and some members introduced articles of impeachment, but none of it moved the needle. Both chambers had already rejected multiple war powers resolutions along mostly party lines, and the institutional mechanisms designed for exactly this moment remained frozen.
The consequences of that failure don’t fall on the president. “The greater responsibility lies with the president and civilian defense officials,” Carpenter wrote, “as well as Congress, whose job is to hold the president accountable to ensure troops receive only lawful orders.” When Congress fails to do that, it isn’t just a failure of democratic norms. It puts the troops themselves in legal and moral jeopardy.
America’s allies have been nearly as quiet. Several Gulf nations privately warned the administration against such strikes, according to CNN, but most avoided any public rebuke. The countries that did speak — Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey — worked as mediators, not as moral voices. The international community managed to help broker a ceasefire. It did not manage to say, clearly and collectively, that what was threatened was wrong.
This is the accountability gap that civic democracy advocates should be naming plainly. The legal framework exists. The evidence of threatened conduct is public and undisputed. What is absent is the institutional will — in Congress, among allies, in the cabinet — to treat the threat of war crimes as something that demands a response regardless of whether the bombs actually fell. That silence is itself a form of permission.
That gap is now painfully visible again. The Islamabad talks — the first direct U.S.-Iran engagement since 2015 and the highest-level since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — collapsed on Sunday after 21 hours without an agreement. Vance left Pakistan, saying Iran had “chosen not to accept our terms.” Within hours, Trump threatened a full naval blockade. The ceasefire that seemed like a reprieve has become, instead, a brief intermission.
We are back where we started: a president who threatened to annihilate a civilization, with no formal accountability from Congress, no unified rebuke from allies, and no consequences for the threats themselves. The bombs didn’t fall last Tuesday. They may yet fall this week. Every actor in the world now knows that a threat of this magnitude can pass without consequence, and that the institutions designed to prevent it will post about Easter egg rolls instead.
Kristina Becvar is Senior Advisor to the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. She previously served as the Executive Director of the Bridge Alliance,