Dr. Quentin Holmes, Sr. is assistant professor of public administration for Grambling State University and a retired Chief of Police in Monroe, LA. Dr. Nina Agrawal, MD FAAP is a pediatrician and chair of the American Medical Women’s Association Gun Violence Solutions Committee. Jasmine Hull is a former educational administrator and has launched K-12 charter schools in multiple states across the US.
Gun violence is a national crisis. Daily shootings have become the norm. Mass shootings are on the rise. Because gun related violence is now a leading cause of death for children and young adults, today’s youth are known as the lockdown generation. This is not typical of a developed nation.
With a perpetual gridlock in Congress, it raises the question: is there anything that can be done to reduce or eliminate gun violence in America?
This critical question is precisely what drew us together - a New York pediatrician, a retired police chief from Louisiana, and a Texas based K-12 administrator. Together, with a diverse panel of other medical, educational, political, and social science experts, we met over a series of discussions with the sole goal of finding shared solutions.
By examining the issue through multiple lenses, and leveraging the use of Deliberations.US, a tool designed to build civic education and engagement muscles through guided deliberations, we have developed a live, guided conversation showing different perspectives on, and different potential actions to take in regards to, reducing gun violence in America. The result is a nation-wide conversation that prioritizes problem-solving over polarization and people over politics.
In a collaboration with both staff and students at Harvard and Stanford, Deliberations.US has been engaging in online and in-person deliberations since 2021. By employing a nonpartisan, unbiased, and factual approach, participants can increase their understanding of complex topics and achieve a deeper understanding of those with differing perspectives. A core component of the Deliberations.US process is targeting issues most meaningful to participants. As more and more students, teachers, and staff were integrated into the deliberation process we continued to ask what topics were real and present to them. Across the board, the most requested conversation was, and continues to be, gun violence. It’s a topic that threatens the health, safety, and economic viability of our entire country and is top of mind for our nation's youngest generation.
A commonly held belief is the only way to address gun violence is by enacting policies that often lack overall consensus. This type of action may temporarily address the impacts and trauma inflicted upon our nation by gun violence, but only for a finite time. Without common ground, any political action to reduce gun violence will constantly be under threat - it may only last as long as it takes to conclude a new election cycle or for a judge to retire. Our government was built upon compromise, but how can there be compromise when lives are on the line?
We can all agree that something must be done to reduce gun violence in this country. However, what we disagree on is how it should be done. Major actions are being taken across the nation, in red and blue states and across party lines, to try and address this crisis. Red flag laws, expanded social services, increased background checks, bolstered research funding, and firearm bans all have champions both for and against their implementation and effectiveness. Some argue that these policies have been successful and need to be scaled up, while others argue they’re ineffective or conflict with citizen’s constitutional rights.
Regardless of where someone stands on these particular issues, we’ve already established a point of common ground: Americans want to see changes in how we address gun violence. History shows us that in order to take meaningful action and affect lasting change we must begin with having difficult conversations, establishing common ground, and building upon a foundation of shared respect and passions.
It’s up to us to unite, in-person and online, to have difficult and civil conversations that will both inform and empower us to take action together. We invite you to join us as we launch our new deliberation, a powerful conversation on “Reducing Gun Violence” in America.
We are holding deliberations as a featured partner of the Listen First Coalition’s National Week of Conversation - a week-long series of events designed to create an open space for bridging divides, rekindling relationships, and having meaningful and impactful conversations. As part of this series, we will be hosting online deliberations throughout the week of April 17. All are welcome to participate.
We invite you to sign up for this conversation and learn more at Deliberations.US.
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.