Daulby is CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation.
As Mr. Rogers famously said, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
A few months ago, I became the new CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation with a renewed mission to lead the helpers back to the Capitol. After a career on Capitol Hill that started as a paid intern and ended after being the staff director for the House Administration Committee on Jan. 6, 2021, I have been called back to serve the institution. I agreed to do so because we are in desperate need of the helpers, and having been a doer for the last two decades, it is now time for me to be a helper.
In addition to the presidential election, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives were on the ballot Tuesday along with roughly a third of the Senate. Our institution is rapidly turning over and we will see hundreds of new staff come to Washington in January. I have watched with much joy and enthusiasm the progress that has been made on Capitol Hill, and particularly in the House. Staff have access to a team of bipartisan coaches and online resources from which to learn and grow in their current positions, thanks to the office of the Chief Administrative Officer. Staff retreats are now commonplace and offered by three entities in the House. While I was on the Hill, my team established the Congressional Excellence program that continues to provide individual leadership development and coaching to members of Congress.
We are making progress.
However, for outside organizations like the Congressional Management Foundation to move the needle on making Congress work more and squabble less, we need more helpers. With the growing popularity of the “fix Congress” movement and acceptance that we need infrastructure like the House Administration Committee’s modernization subcommittee, we started a trend … which has become a habit of telling Congress what it can do better. Most members and staff know that Congress needs improvement, but they need a helping hand.
Well-meaning organizations have sent letters, published op-eds and spoken on panels in a silo. So much of this important work never gets communicated effectively to the Hill and so few resources have been committed to directly sharing our work and executing programing that help the members of Congress achieve what we are publicly telling them to do. That is why CMF will continue to support leadership and professional development opportunities, building a community that strengthens bipartisan relationships and facilitating educational opportunities that leverage private-sector expertise.
CMF’s Revitalizing Congress program is just one example of the work we do to help Congress function more efficiently. This program works with members of Congress to:
- Improve staff work life.
- Transform constituent and public engagement.
- Provide professional development services to members.
- Encourage innovation.
- And much, much more.
So many American feel Congress is broken. These beliefs have become so embedded in our society that it seems most Americans have lost hope in an institution that seems ineffective, unresponsive and unable to address the challenges America faces. Most Americans see only examples of ineptitude, petty partisan politics and the occasional scandal on Capitol Hill.
But what if Americans got a glimpse of a different Congress? Americans' views might change if they saw examples of members of Congress employing innovative practices to engage with citizens, or congressional offices employing private-sector business practices to improve their operations. And what would other lawmakers do if they also saw how their colleagues enhanced their operations and citizen engagement?
In this spirit, CMF created a distinctive honors program — the Democracy Awards — to recognize non-legislative achievement and performance in congressional offices and by members of Congress.
And we do so much more.
In the coming weeks our congressional management guide, “Setting Course,” will be published and distributed to all new members of Congress and their staff. We will follow that publication with a series of workshops for new staff in 2025 that will help them onboard to these new positions. We will offer staff academies on pressing topics and cohort dinners with staff from both sides of the aisle with private-sector leaders. Staff are desperate for hard skills and professional development tools. We will continue to conduct retreats, offer webinars on office skills and run management classes.
The work of the helpers never ends. I hope you will follow us on our journey.
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.