Firstenberg, a former Senate staffer, is an artist and created an installation near the Washington Monument to make visible the human toll of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I probably have, what, 10 more years? And nothing to do with them,” he said. The 64-year-old good ol’ boy had meant to vent his frustration. Instead, he uncovered his sad truth.
By pulling front-end in beside my charging Tesla, he had blocked my car door from opening with his black, extended cab F150. Parked with windows open at a Wawa in southern Virginia, I became his defacto captive audience.
“How long does it take to charge that thing?” he began. Without waiting for my response, he launched his first salvo, “You know, that battery will be an environmental hazard.” Likely, he had just pumped $5.29 per gallon gas.
His grievances burst forth in a racist, liberal-bashing, ugly froth. Always ready to learn about people, I let him talk. Figuring he would not physically attack me in broad daylight, I employed the fine art of rational/emotional jujitsu. We had chosen our weapons — his was anger and grievance. Mine was that he had underestimated me.
As he railed against Black people, I looked into his eyes and asked, “What makes you and me better than Black people?” As evidence, he told me of a Black woman who had set her bag of Costco groceries on the hood of his truck while she buckled her daughter into her car seat.
“So you cared more about your paint job than the safety of a child?” I challenged him. He stammered, then continued. He had lost his job at a florist shop because he had called a customer the “N” word. “And the woman who fired me was older than me!”
Now we were getting somewhere.
“President Biden is ruining the country!” he said, pivoting subjects.
“Congress is the problem,” I countered, asking him who is sending all these idiots to D.C. “People have more power than they know,” I countered. “Vote for better people.”
“The environment is going to hell. Everything is going to hell,” he lamented. “I probably have 10 more years to go … and what do I have to do?”
“You can help a lot of people in 10 years’ time. You just have to focus on others.”
Twenty minutes of being heard likely did not change his world. Those minutes changed mine. They clarified the existential depths of despair that animate America’s angry and aggrieved.
They need us to hear them. Not to agree, but to guide them away from identities of ideology and to challenge them to matter. They can matter. With our help, most of them will.
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.