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?
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The Politics of Gratitude: Why Washington Punishes the Loyalty It Cannot Price
Nov 07, 2026
On a Sunday night in August, Senator Jon Ossoff told a campaign rally in Atlanta that President Trump would rather build his ballroom and “travel with Natalie” than do his job. He never used her last name. He did not need to. Natalie Harp, the White House aide known to colleagues as Trump’s “human printer” for trailing him with a portable printer and transcribing his social-media dictation, had become a punchline before most Americans knew who she was.
The backlash arrived within hours. White House officials accused Ossoff of insinuating an affair; Republican Rep. Brandon Gill noted that Harp survived bone cancer only because the Right to Try Act, which Trump signed in 2018, let her seek an experimental treatment outside the normal approval process, and dismissed any other reading of the moment as unfair. Weeks earlier, Harp had been at the center of a far more consequential story: in July, she was one of a handful of aides, alongside the defense secretary and two senior staffers, chosen to accompany Trump on a covert switch of aircraft as he left a security summit in Turkey after officials detected a credible Iranian threat, while most of the traveling delegation stayed behind on a decoy plane. That is the real proximity Ossoff's line was needling. Then came a detail that complicated the story further: Trump had personally given Harp and several other aides cash gifts of $45,000 apiece, which a former federal ethics official called troublesome, since money on that scale can leave a recipient feeling indebted to whoever signs the check.
It would be a mistake to treat this as a story about one senator's bad night, or one aide's unusual devotion. It is a small, sharp example of something larger: a political culture that has grown almost incapable of processing loyalty that is not for sale.
A life interrupted, then rerouted
Harp has said publicly, including at the 2020 Republican convention, that she exhausted approved cancer treatments before the Right to Try Act let her request an experimental drug directly from a manufacturer. Whether the law has actually helped many people is genuinely disputed; a year after passage, only two patients had come forward to say they used it, and the FDA already approved more than ninety-nine percent of similar compassionate-use requests before the law existed. For one patient out of options, though, the statistics are beside the point. Her gratitude is the plain reaction of someone who believes a specific law kept her alive. Her own estranged brother, asked in a television interview about the intensity of her devotion, traced it back to values their mother instilled in the family, a small domestic echo of the same instinct now debated in the White House press room.
The pardon czar's complicated second act
Alice Johnson’s story runs on a similar track, with a more honest twist. Johnson served twenty-one years of a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense before Trump commuted it in 2018 and later pardoned her outright; in February 2025 he made her his “pardon czar.” When Johnson helped secure this year’s pardons of reality-television stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted of fraud and tax evasion, some of her own longtime allies in criminal-justice reform accused her of becoming a political token, lending her moral authority to pardons that had little to do with the nonviolent drug cases that made her famous. That criticism came from people who once considered her one of their own, which shows that unpriced gratitude can alienate even the community it is meant to represent.
The market price of leaving
Compare that with how Washington treats the opposite choice. Cassidy Hutchinson earned roughly seventy to ninety thousand dollars a year in the West Wing before testifying against her former boss's inner circle; within a year she had a book deal reportedly worth two hundred fifty to five hundred thousand dollars, and by 2026 her estimated net worth ran between three and five million dollars. Staff turnover itself is not the scandal; Brookings data shows Trump's senior staff turnover reached fifty-four percent by late August, close to Biden's forty-three percent and Reagan's fifty-seven percent at similar points in their terms. What is unusual is which departures pay off. A quiet exit earns nothing. A damaging story can out-earn years of government salary within months of publication. Loyalty that survives the paycheck carries none of that market value, so to a press fluent in tell-alls, it can look like a performance rather than the truth.
A reflex older than this administration
This is not one party’s habit. In 2012, conservatives mocked the Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” slideshow, which followed a fictional woman benefiting from federal programs at each stage of her life; Paul Ryan called it creepy, and one prominent columnist labeled the government in it a “Sugar Daddy.” The target differed, a composite illustration rather than a real aide, but the reflex was the same one now aimed at Harp: suspicion toward any story in which a policy visibly improves a life, as if gratitude itself were proof of manipulation.
The trust deficit underneath it
That reflex has a measurable foundation. Pew Research has tracked a long collapse in Americans' trust in the federal government, from a peak of seventy-seven percent in the early 1960s to roughly one in five today. When trust in institutions falls that far, personal devotion to any single leader stops reading as ordinary human gratitude and starts reading as either naiveté or a transaction, because the press and the public have settled on no third category for it. Harp's printer, Johnson's place at the president's side, Hutchinson's book advance, all get sorted into one of those two bins, whether or not either one actually fits.
What the attacks actually signal
Targeting a low-level aide on a rally stage, or mocking a slideshow, is usually a tell about what a campaign would rather not discuss. The Ossoff-Harp exchange dominated coverage for days, far longer than his substantive criticism of the administration's Iran policy or the economy. Personal mockery travels faster than argument, and it costs a candidate nothing to deliver.
Harp, Johnson, Hutchinson, and Julia trace one line across two decades and both parties: a capital that prices almost everything struggles to believe in a debt that is not for sale. Repairing that blind spot will not fix Washington's polarization on its own, but it would remove one of its pettiest tics, the reflex to turn gratitude into a punchline before anyone has to reckon with whether it is sincere.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking.
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A map labeling Lake Ontario as "Lake America" is displayed as U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on August 27, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Cartography of Convenience: Why Rushed Renaming Erodes Public Trust
Nov 06, 2026
In tough economic times, governments often reach for the easiest kind of progress: a new name on an old sign. Wage stagnation, inflation, crumbling roads, and rising rents are hard problems that take years and real money to fix. Renaming a street, a lake, or a strait is not. It costs a fraction as much and lets officials point to something they “did.” A new name never fixes a pothole or lowers a grocery bill. This year offered an unusually rich catalogue of the habit, reaching from a city council in Texas to a wartime waterway in the Persian Gulf.
A Concept Borrowed From the Cremation Ground
Indian philosophy has an old idea called shmashana vairagya, describing the sudden clarity a person feels standing at a cremation ground, when ordinary ambitions look small. The feeling fades once the mourner goes home. Public policy has its own version of this cycle. In the raw hours after a tragedy, a scandal, or a surge of national feeling, officials decide, sometimes within a single social media post, what belongs on a map or a sign forever. The emotion passes in hours. The bill, when there is one, stays for years.
The Cesar Chavez Problem, Still Unsolved
Consider Austin. In March 2026, a New York Times investigation reported allegations that labor leader Cesar Chavez had sexually assaulted young women and girls, including fellow organizer Dolores Huerta. Within days, four Austin council members publicly backed renaming Cesar Chavez Street, which has carried his name since 1993. To Austin’s credit, the city did not simply hold a snap vote. The council ordered a formal cost and engagement plan; by May, staff estimated renaming could cost up to $1.2 million and would touch hundreds of businesses and homes along the corridor. Public meetings and a survey followed in August, and Huerta herself asked that her name not replace his. Under the city’s own timeline, findings were due to the council in September, with new signs to follow months after any vote. More than six months after the allegations surfaced, the sign is unchanged. Austin deserves credit for treating this as a real decision. But even done carefully, renaming one street is slow and costly. Skipping the care does not make it cheaper. It only makes the result worse.
Flip-Flops on the Public Dime
This pattern crosses party lines. In 2015, President Obama restored the Alaska Native name Denali to North America’s tallest peak; in 2025, President Trump reversed that by executive order, despite Alaska’s legislature voting almost unanimously against it. The Army bases are the costliest example. In 2021, a bipartisan Congress, overriding a presidential veto, ordered nine bases named for Confederate generals renamed. The Naming Commission put the cost at $21 million; the Army later revised it to $39 million. In 2025, the Pentagon restored all nine original names, attaching each to a different, non-Confederate namesake, and has not published what the reversal cost. Taxpayers paid tens of millions of dollars so nine bases could end up, four years later, back where they started.
From Streets to Straits
This year the impulse jumped scale entirely. On August 27, President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” amid an escalating trade war with Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney answered that Canadians would keep calling it Lake Ontario, “then, now and always,” and New York Governor Kathy Hochul said her state “won’t be calling it that” either. An order can rename a lake in a federal database; it cannot make anyone else say the new name out loud.
Six days later, on Truth Social, the president floated an even bolder idea: renaming the Strait of Hormuz, the oil chokepoint at the center of the American campaign against Iran, “Trump Strait,” because, as he put it, “Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before!” Hours later, he said it had been “just thrown out there.” Serious or not, it was a sitting president’s name floated for a strategic waterway, exactly the kind of living-person monument history warns against. That is shmashana vairagya in real time, on a president’s own feed.
Two Modest Rules
Honors that last, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s name on streets nationwide, are built on decades of evidence, not a single news cycle. Two rules would help. First, never name public property, foreign or domestic, after a living person, since their story is not yet finished. This is not a one-party habit: in 2000, a federal radio telescope in West Virginia was christened for Senator Robert Byrd, the Democrat who had pushed its funding through Congress and who would serve another decade. Second, after a death, require a five-year wait before any formal naming vote. Five years is long enough for facts to settle and short enough to avoid becoming an excuse for inaction.
Neither rule is a guarantee. Austin named its street for Chavez the year he died, and no waiting period would have caught allegations that took three decades to surface. The rules make reversals rarer, not impossible.
Governing for the Living
None of this argues against ever renaming anything; names should change when the truth about a person changes. Those pushing to rename Chavez Street have a real point: no community should be asked to keep honoring a man accused of sexually abusing girls. But that decision deserves the rigor of a bridge inspection, not the speed of a press release or a social media post. When governments spend months and up to $1.2 million on a sign while potholes go unfilled, voters notice, and public trust pays the price. A strait, a lake, a street: a name can matter, but it is rarely the problem people actually live with. Treating a renaming as an accomplishment, however satisfying it feels, is not governing. It is decoration.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. His writing has appeared in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (PNAS), RealClear platforms, Washington Examiner, The Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, and South Asia Monitor, where he serves on the editorial board. He also hosts the interview show “SAM Dialogues with Dr. M. P. Reddy.” Website: mpreddyinsights.com | Contact: mpreddy54@yahoo.com, https://lnkd.in/gn2zQJbs
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U.S. President Donald Trump on February 6, 2026.
(Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
A Demagogue in the White House: Will the Guardrails Hold?
Nov 02, 2026
A demagogue does not seize all power at once. He takes it piece by piece.
In Trump’s second administration, those pieces accumulated in plain sight. The president generated so much disruption and noise that Americans struggled to keep pace. Each new controversy displaced the last, obscuring a more consequential story: the steady accumulation of presidential power.
A demagogue gains support by exploiting fear, grievance and prejudice, portraying himself as the people’s indispensable champion against threatening enemies and institutions. Trump offered perhaps his clearest expression of that idea when he declared, “I Alone Can Fix It.”
We should have paid closer attention to the word alone.
The warning signs were not hidden. Trump portrayed immigrants as dangerous, said they were “poisoning the blood of our country,” labeled political opponents the “enemy from within” and told supporters, “I am your retribution.” Together, these statements reveal the pattern of demagoguery: magnify fear, identify enemies, exploit grievance and present one leader as the people’s indispensable protector.
Yet Americans returned him to the White House.
The Framers did not know Trump. But they understood the archetype: the ambitious leader who exploits division, cultivates personal loyalty and seeks greater power. They did not write the Constitution assuming every president would be virtuous. They designed it for the possibility that one would not be.
Their answer was not trust in the president. Their answer was divided power.
James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 that instability, injustice and confusion had been “mortal diseases” of popular governments. In Federalist No. 51, he warned against the “gradual concentration” of power and wrote that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
The Framers gave Congress legislative, spending, oversight and impeachment powers, established an independent judiciary and protected a free press capable of scrutinizing government. These guardrails were intended to prevent the concentration and abuse of presidential power, keep public office a public trust and ensure that no president could place himself above the law.
The genius of the system was not that it guaranteed a demagogue would never reach the White House. It was that the Republic might survive if one did.
Those guardrails have now been tested.
Impeachment was designed as an extraordinary remedy for serious abuses of public trust. Trump was impeached twice and acquitted twice by the Senate. The proceedings exposed a vulnerability: impeachment cannot restrain presidential power when partisan loyalty overwhelms independent constitutional judgment.
The Constitution’s emoluments provisions reflected concern that financial benefit and foreign influence could compromise public power. Trump’s continuing business interests raise a larger question: Can the presidency remain a public trust when governmental authority and private financial interests repeatedly occupy the same space?
The scale is extraordinary. A conservative accounting by The New Yorker journalist David Kirkpatrick estimated that Trump and his immediate family made nearly $4 billion by leveraging his presidency during roughly the first year of his second term. Presidential power intertwined with private enrichment on that scale demands scrutiny.
Here again, the guardrail question is unavoidable: Are constitutional guardrails adequately restraining the collision of public power and private gain?
Yet financial integrity is only one test. The constitutional guardrail under greatest strain may be the most fundamental of all: separation of powers.
Congress was never intended to become a president’s supporting cast. The Framers expected congressional ambition to counter presidential ambition. Yet when legislators fear presidential retaliation, surrender institutional authority or place partisan allegiance above constitutional responsibility, that counterweight weakens.
A check that refuses to check is little protection at all.
The judiciary is another essential guardrail, and here the answer is complicated. Courts have restrained some administration actions, but court orders have also faced serious compliance disputes. In April 2025, a federal district court found probable cause that the administration had willfully failed to comply with one of its orders.
The Supreme Court’s record is also mixed. In June 2026, it overturned roughly nine decades of precedent protecting Federal Trade Commission commissioners from at-will presidential removal, expanding presidential control over independent executive agencies while preserving separate protections for Federal Reserve governors.
The judiciary has not collapsed as a guardrail. But neither has it consistently restrained the concentration of executive power.
Taken together, the record offers an uncomfortable answer: constitutional guardrails do not hold simply because they exist. Some have worked. Others have bent, weakened or failed at consequential moments. All depend upon people willing to exercise constitutional power with independence, courage and fidelity.
Institutions alone cannot save a Republic. People operate them.
Representatives vote. Judges rule. Public officials decide whether their oath means fidelity to the Constitution or loyalty to a president. Journalists scrutinize power. Citizens decide whom to entrust with it.
Constitutional fidelity must become the standard.
The people possess a guardrail of their own: the power to replace leaders who refuse to defend the constitutional order.
Voting is more than a partisan exercise. Examine who defended constitutional authority and who surrendered it. Who demanded accountability and who excused misconduct. Who protected independent institutions and who placed personal loyalty above an oath.
Do not ask only what party a candidate represents. Ask what constitutional principles that candidate will defend when defending them becomes politically costly.
Americans are exhausted. But exhaustion cannot become surrender.
Do not follow the noise. Follow the power.
Read the legislation. Examine the votes. Follow the money. Question representatives. Speak out. Petition government. Demonstrate peacefully. Vote.
When those entrusted with constitutional power refuse to use it, the people must use theirs.
And when elected leaders will not defend the constitutional order?
Replace them.
So, will the guardrails hold?
Only if we make them hold.
The Constitution cannot supply courage, cast our votes or compel allegiance to constitutional principle over allegiance to a president.
That responsibility is ours.
The Framers gave us a Republic capable of surviving a demagogue. They left keeping it to us.
Now we must keep it.
_____________________________________________________________________
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and former principal who spent her career advancing civic responsibility, equity, and public engagement. She writes about democracy, ethical leadership, and the values that strengthen American communities.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump followed by Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan and U.S. first lady Melania Trump arrive for a state dinner in the East Room of the White House on September 24, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
When Leaders Disagree, Ceremony Plays an Important Role
Oct 30, 2026
When Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived at the White House on 24 September, the U.S. welcomed him with an elaborate display of ceremony. The Army Herald Trumpets sounded a fanfare, the Chinese and American national anthems were played, and the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps performed. A military review was followed by a flyover involving a B-2 bomber and four F-22 fighter jets, according to the White House. It was an extraordinary production for two countries that still disagree on some of the most important issues in international politics.
Talks between President Donald Trump and Xi touched on trade, artificial intelligence and Taiwan. The visit was marked by warm words and some signs of cooperation, but it did not erase the fundamental competition between the United States and China. So why was all this ceremony staged? It is tempting to dismiss political pomp as mere window dressing: an expensive historical relic surrounding the serious business taking place behind closed doors. As a music historian, however, I think this misunderstands what ceremony does. Ceremony can become particularly valuable when words alone are not enough.
Long before governments could issue statements instantly, political authority communicated through sound and movement. Trumpets announced arrivals and bells marked public events. Processions established hierarchies, while anthems and military bands allowed states to demonstrate their relationships even before anyone issued a communiqué.
Today, a president can address millions of people in seconds, while citizens can follow diplomatic negotiations almost in real time. And yet, when another head of state arrives, we still raise flags, invite musicians and perform carefully rehearsed rituals. The purpose of ceremony is not necessarily to demonstrate agreement. Sometimes its purpose is to make disagreement manageable.
Music is especially useful here because it can express recognition without requiring ideological consensus. Performing another country's national anthem does not imply approval of its government or policies. It signifies recognition of the state and the people represented by its leader. The same is true of many diplomatic rituals. A handshake does not resolve a trade dispute, and a state dinner does not ease tensions over Taiwan. These gestures instead create a temporary framework within which disagreements can take place.
Much of our public political culture is designed to highlight differences. Diplomacy sometimes has to do something more complex: acknowledge deep disagreements while preserving a relationship capable of weathering them. Ceremony offers a language that makes this possible. Of course, there is another side to political spectacle. Ritual can glorify power. Military ceremony deliberately demonstrates strength, and the B-2 bomber that flew over the White House was hardly a neutral prop.
Nor should carefully orchestrated hospitality be confused with diplomatic success. Governments can stage grand ceremonies while achieving very little, and pomp can divert attention from difficult political realities. Ceremony cannot replace successful diplomacy. But it does not lose its meaning simply because it does not lead to the signing of a treaty.
Consider the mixture of signals contained in the White House welcome. The Chinese national anthem was played alongside the American one. Xi was received with the honours accorded to a visiting head of state. At the same time, the ceremony demonstrated U.S. military might with extraordinary clarity. Hospitality and power were not contradictory messages. They were conveyed simultaneously.
This is something ritual does exceptionally well. Music historians encounter this throughout history: music has accompanied coronations, funerals and diplomatic events because it can communicate meaning without requiring everyone present to interpret that meaning in precisely the same way.
Relations between states, like relations between people, depend on more than the transmission of information. They also depend on recognition. A ceremony says: you have arrived; we recognise the significance of this meeting; for the duration of this encounter, we have agreed to occupy the same political space. None of this requires friendship.
In fact, ceremony may be most revealing precisely when friendship is absent. If two governments already agree, ritual reinforces an existing relationship. When they are deeply divided, the ritual itself can become part of the mechanism that allows them to remain in the same room.
Outside the ceremonial framework of the Trump-Xi meeting lay unresolved questions about trade, artificial intelligence and Taiwan. Inside it were trumpets, flags and carefully rehearsed movements. One did not preclude the other. The ceremony created a temporary language through which two rival powers could acknowledge one another without pretending that their differences had disappeared.
In an era when compromise is often seen as weakness and disagreement as a reason to stop listening, there may be something worth noting in this old diplomatic tradition. Sometimes the first achievement isn't agreement. It’s the fact that dialogue remains possible.
Stacy Jarvis is a Manchester-based music historian, culture writer and violinist. She writes about classical music, cultural history and the intersections between music, politics and society, with work appearing in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Conversation and other UK and international publications. She is also a radio contributor and is completing a PhD in Musicology at the University of Birmingham.
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