Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
American politics is so intensely stupid and nasty that it sometimes seems as if somebody made a series of wishes with a monkey's paw. The dark moral of "The Monkey's Paw," a 1902 short story by the English writer W.W. Jacobs that became a pop culture trope, is that you should be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
In 2008, the widespread wish for an African American president who would usher in a new "post-racial" politics yielded to an era of heightened obsession with and tensions over race. In 2016, the ancient dream of a capitalist outsider who would run government like a business delivered a man who ran the government like it was in the business of promoting and enriching him. In 2020, the notion that a non-military threat could unite a divided country around a common challenge gave way to sharp polarization over the management, treatment and origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And then there's the dream of the third-party or independent candidate who can break the Republican-Democratic duopoly and deliver rational politics and policies unbeholden to special interests and fringe ideologues. Few scenarios are more attractive to Americans exhausted by the partisan bickering and sclerosis that define Washington.
The hitch is that while voters and donors love the idea in the abstract, many recoil in the face of a flesh-and-blood third-party candidate. Organizations such as No Labels and the Libertarian and Green parties rightly highlight voter hunger for an alternative to Donald Trump and President Biden, but they have struggled to find a human as popular as the wish.
In some respects, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks just like what people are longing for. He rejects both parties. And he claims to want to break the stranglehold of government bureaucracy, the cult of experts and the outsize power of corporate interests.
But while the wish is for a passionate centrist independent of the extremes, Kennedy in reality is a crank who attempts to transcend left and right by peddling a dog's breakfast of conspiratorialism from across the ideological spectrum.
Long before Trump, RFK Jr. was the original election denier, insisting that Republicans stole the 2004 election. Before COVID-19, Kennedy was already famous for falsely claiming that all vaccines are dangerous and that some cause autism. He also stands by his claim that cellphones and Wi-Fi cause cancer despite the lack of evidence of an increase in cancer rates amid exploding use of those technologies.
Kennedy's default position is that official explanations are suspect, which is another way of saying that all conspiracy theories -- from 9/11 trutherism to fringe theories about the assassination of his own father to the idea that the COVID-19 virus was engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people -- deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's as if his entire political persona were designed to monetize what the political historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics." It's a testament to the pervasiveness of the paranoid style that it's difficult to figure out which party Kennedy will take more votes from.
"Our campaign is a spoiler all right," Kennedy said last week while announcing his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, in Oakland. "It is a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump."
But there's the rub: The same duopoly that Kennedy is running against ensures that he can be a spoiler for only one candidate. Hofstadter also said, "Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die." And the party they sting is the one they are closest to. As of now, it looks like Kennedy wants to sting leftward, at Biden. His choice of Shanahan -- a progressive, young, Asian American, California-based tech lawyer -- is one indication. Another: Timothy Mellon, the biggest donor to Kennedy's Super PAC, is also the biggest donor to Trump's. It seems unlikely that spoiling Trump's candidacy would be his priority.
In Jacobs' story (spoiler alert), the protagonist uses the monkey's paw to wish for 200 pounds to pay off his mortgage. The next day, he learns that his son was fatally mangled in an industrial accident and receives a bereavement payment in that amount. After the funeral, the grieving father wishes his son brought back to life. But as he hears a knock on the door, he realizes that the fulfillment of his wish would be a disfigured abomination and, panicked, makes his last wish. When he opens the door, no one's there.
If you've ever fondly wished for deliverance from our two-party system, the man you hear knocking is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
First posted April 3, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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.