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.
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.