Klug served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1991-1999. He hosts the national political podcast “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans” and is a “no-marshmallow-in-the-sweet-potatoes” guy.
It would be nice this Thanksgiving if the fight were over which football games to watch. Or a debate over the best green bean casserole recipe. Sadly, for the last four years, too many Thanksgivings have ended with an argument over politics.
The sad fact is that this doesn’t only happen in hyper-partisan households. In our reporting on the lost political middle, we find that even political orphans got sucked into the vortex.
“I mean, we walk on eggshells in our own dining room,” said Angela Larson, who lives on a family farm just outside of Rockford, Ill. She and her sister got into an argument and didn’t talk for nearly a year.
“Our family has very different ideas on politics and policy, and so we try not to talk about it, or we try not to show up when we know it's going to be talked about. But that’s really sad from a family standpoint, from a friend standpoint.”
The same thing happened to Tami Pyfer and her five kids in Logan, Utah. In birth order, her children are Republican, Independent, Democrat, Democratic Socialist, and Libertarian.
“I call it good parenting when, because they've all found their voice, they all have found their political home,” she commented. “When they were little kids, they delighted in putting up signs for my city council races.”
But like in Angela’s household, Covid masks, the economy, Trump and Biden turned good-natured ribbing into an ugly scene.
“It got to be not fun anymore at all,” Tami said. “And everything was so polarized. It became quite difficult for us to manage. So, we stop talking about politics and stop getting together as often,” she said regretfully.
Tami decided to do something about it. Not just impacting her own dining room but the nation. Working with a national group called “Unite,” she and her colleagues cling to the old-fashioned idea of civility. Their first focus was the poisonous language used by elected officials, often in the heat of campaigns.
“Do we have things in common where I say, ‘I disagree with you, but I can see where you're coming from.’ The minute you start name calling, you're in contempt the minute you start saying you're ruining the country,” she explained.
Fundamentally, Democracy is, after all, based on the idea that, as a country, we often face difficult problems. Yet, at the core of our national beliefs is that we have to acknowledge there are different ways to solve them.
Vanderbilt professor Robert Talise argues that “what civility is asking of us is not that we don't disagree, but that in our disagreement, we don't lose sight of the fact that the guy on the other side, despite the fact that he's wrong, nonetheless, is entitled to an equal say. And so he can't be our enemy.”
Keep that in mind this Thanksgiving. Turn off Fox News and MSNBC. Choose the football game instead. An argument over sweet potatoes with or without marshmallows is a better way to go. And hug all of the guests as they head out the door, even the opinionated cousin who knows how to get under your skin.
America could use a break this holiday.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.