Weichlein is the CEO of FMC: The Former Members of Congress Association.
Just in time for Veterans Day, Rep. Paul Gosar discovered his inner warrior. Armed with an anime sword and less than impressive software, the Arizona Republican released to the world a 90-second window into his soul: his fantasy of being a flying far-right superhero who murders woke libs such as his colleague, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and tries to do the same to President Biden.
If a high schooler shared a clip of themselves decapitating a fellow student, the principal, parents and school district would take notice. When a Republican member of Congress does so, the answer by party leadership is that libs/lamestream media/cancel culture propagandists can’t take a joke. While there certainly are many of us who find Gosar’s behavior vile and Republican leadership’s collective shoulder-shrug disappointing, I’m guessing from a fundraising point of view coupled with the need to demonstrate fierceness to primary voters, the 90 seconds of fantasized bloodshed was highly profitable.
Vilifying your political opponent is neither new nor practiced by one party alone, but the ease by which calls for action can be disseminated via social media heightens a message’s impact and brings with it the added responsibility for grown-ups to act as such. I don’t think Gosar has a sword in his office and is just waiting for the right opportunity to turn fantasy into action. I also don’t think he will enter the Capitol and cause bloody carnage. However, on Jan. 6, hundreds of our fellow Americans did just that, spurred on by years of ever-increasing violent political messaging by office holders and seekers alike.
When I first saw Gosar’s fantasy clip, I was reminded of Joseph Welch. You may not know who he is, but you’ll certainly know what he said and who he said it to. During a fierce exchange with Sen. Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954, Welch just couldn’t take the senator’s outrageous and unhinged conspiracy theories any longer: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” If ever given the opportunity, that’s what I envision myself saying to Paul Gosar: “You walk the same marbled floors as Abraham Lincoln, John McCain and John Lewis. Where’s your sense of decency?”
Shouldn’t simply being a “decent” human being be the threshold when it comes to choosing our elected representatives? Can’t we expect that, at a minimum, public officials will act with common decency? That’s my fantasy, and it doesn’t involve a sword. However, upon further reflection, it occurred to me that Gosar’s video is simply a reflection of the system that he is stuck with. Asking him to respect an ultra-liberal colleague is like asking a linebacker to be kind to the quarterback.
Gosar represents a solidly Republican district and has been elected every two years with about 70 percent of the vote. Thanks to gerrymandering, the only contest he has to worry about is the Republican primary. Like most other districts in America, if you win your primary, you’re pretty much guaranteed the seat, and that’s true of state maps drawn by Democrats as well.
There are about 800,000 people living in Gosar’s district, and about 80,000 of them voted for him in the Republican primary. That means that roughly 10 percent of the people in the district bothered to show up for a primary election. They did their civic duty. They made a point of casting a vote and being part of the process. They got in their cars, took a couple of minutes out of their busy schedules, and showed up, whereas most others couldn’t be bothered. Gosar knows full well that it is those 80,000 voters who make all the difference; his message needs to resonate with them and no one else. And in their estimation, common decency is not what they’re looking for in their representative.
Congress is a reflection of America and its people. Right now, that reflection is one of division, hyper-partisanship, and anger. It is irrational to expect common decency from a candidate for office, when common decency is political suicide and working across the aisle is held against you. It isn’t the member of Congress who is letting us down, it is the voter who thinks primaries are unimportant and performing your civic duty is too much work. At perilous times such as these, being a silent observer rather than an engaged citizen is indecent.
If Americans of all political stripes don’t stand up and act by electing candidates who at a minimum meet the “decent human being” test, the current climate will only get worse and worse. In order to effectuate change, voters must give candidates for office an incentive. Right now, with too many gerrymandered districts that have elevated primaries to the deciding contest, the incentive for many candidates is to perpetuate the tribal and belligerent narrative. And the incentive for party leadership is to punish members who voted for legislation championed by the other party and rally around a member whom you’d rather not have as your next-door neighbor. Americans who have given up on representative democracy are to blame, and that’s the ultimate indecency.
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.