My wife and I have monitored (or to be more exact, policed) our kids’ video game usage over the years. No violence, no guns, no military games. So, years ago we introduced a game to our kids that they actually liked even though it met all of our requirements.
“Overcooked” requires participants to collaborate to prepare a meal. Players must talk to each other in advance, plan the process for adding ingredients and, when the game starts, share resources and collaborate on strategy to prepare a meal. With a timer adding deadline pressure, players get a sense of tension and fun without the usual disgusting violence. Although there is yelling involved, (“No, I said to add tomato sauce — not pesto — to the pizza!”) the key to winning is communication and collaboration to prepare a meal efficiently and quickly.
At the risk of extrapolating too much from a video game analogy, the revelation perhaps did suggest a solution to the problem of politics at the holiday dinner table. Maybe Americans invest too much in worrying about the potential for political discord at a holiday meal and miss that broader message and meaning of the “holiday season process.” The meal itself is a culmination of an undertaking requiring many people working over a couple of days, resulting in a mutually beneficial (and usually delicious) outcome. Menus are often designed by committee, shopping is conducted by multiple allies and dish preparation is often delegated to many hands. For most families, meals during the holiday season are a collective effort requiring communication, compromise and trust.
The analogy between holiday dinners and how Congress functions is an interesting analogy. While most Americans don’t see it, Congress often creates more constructive results than is normally perceived. I have had a fortunate vantage point to view our democracy. Working for many years for a nonprofit organization that provided confidential advice and training for members of Congress and staff, I had a front row view of the nation’s premiere legislative body in action … and it’s not as bad as most Americans think.
Compromises are “cooked” up on a weekly basis. Constructive legislation may take time to “marinate.” But eventually the end product is eminently palatable to the public. And usually, by the end of a congressional session, a buffet of generally positive outcomes is served to the American people.
To be sure, we have not cracked the code and developed a recipe for solving some of our nation’s thornier problems, such as immigration reform, entitlement benefits and managing the budget deficit. But generally speaking, Congress follows the same methods of good cooks: Plan well, get good ingredients and get the meal on the table in time for dinner. Recent Congresses have produced the largest infrastructure bill in a generation, developed a new method for approving drugs at the FDA and approved every federal budget since 2011 by wide bipartisan majorities.
So perhaps our nation’s leaders would do well to take a step back from the nasty rhetoric that poisons the flavor of our democratic dialogue. Instead, they should consider how to be great chefs, with the culmination being a banquet of legislative accomplishments. Perhaps the holiday dinner preparation analogy is a recipe for satiating the national appetite for positive change, leaving the electorate well fed with a diet of healthy outcomes for the body politic.
Fitch is a former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation and a former Capitol Hill staffer.
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.