Byrd is CEO of Invest America and serves on the Leadership Now Project’s steering committee.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
John F. Kennedy
Rice University, 1962
President Kennedy's iconic Texas speech formalized our national commitment to space innovation and defeating communism. Listeners came away from that moment focused on "how." How will we reach the moon by 1970? How can we beat the Soviet Union? How do we keep focused in an era with so many competing civic and national security priorities?
That one hard thing – reaching a cold, shiny, far-away rock – is rightly history's focal point. My read of that moment is that Kennedy's admonition to reach the moon was both a clear goal and a beautiful metaphor. America's greatness always lies in our exploration and mastering of "the other things."
In the early 1960s, those other things included throwing off the yoke of American apartheid; solving malnutrition and poverty; squaring post-World War II industrial growth with worker rights, and mastering low-level international skirmishes while avoiding nuclear conflagration.
Today's problem set is just as tough. Navigating a tricky inflation economy; adapting to Covid life; managing culture wars plaguing our national conversations; war drums in Eastern Europe; tension with Asia. Next to — and many of us think above – these challenges is our hardest current problem: preserving and protecting our core democracy in the face of rising authoritarian tendencies.
Where I live, New York, a group of committed leaders is focused on elevating democracy issues right here at home. Unite NY was launched after the 2016 election by Martin Babinec, a long-time reform advocate and founder of the cloud-based HR services company TriNet. The group built its platform for New York around important technical fixes and reforms that are difficult to implement in our hyper-polarized political environment. Its agenda is nonpartisan common sense, and would do a lot to push democracy forward for the Empire State's 19 million citizens. These include:
- Advocating for open primaries.
- Allowing citizen-led referendums.
- Expanding and making permanent voting at home.
- Transforming party-controlled election commissions.
- Reform anti-competitive ballot access laws.
We democracy reformers are used to the joy and frustration of explaining why this bouquet of laws and rule changes is vital to a smooth-running society. The passion really emerges from the Republican and Democratic parties, who predictably rise up to oppose any and all changes brought forward.
Today, Unite NY has inspired the two-party duopoly's ire by attempting to secure a nominating ballot line for its candidates to run in the 2022 election – including fielding candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. Their nominees all lean into Unite NY's democracy reform agenda.
Every step of the way, the political status quo has made the process harder for all independent parties. In 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo used a ovid relief bill to increase the signature threshold for those seeking ballot lines in New York from 15,000 to 45,000. Folded into that bill was the requirement to gather at least 500 signatures from a majority of the state's congressional districts, as well as the provision that increased the vote total from 50,000 votes to 130,000 or 2 percent of the vote total for existing parties to maintain a ballot line after the next election cycle.
Unite NY has been challenged at every turn by legislative and political machinery controlled by the two parties. In this election cycle, petition gathering was hampered by the gerrymandered state Senate and congressional district lines. A New York appeals court judge threw out the original post-census map. New congressional lines were approved in late May – just 10 days before the final signature due date. Immediately, opponents of reform sent challenges to the state Board of Elections seeking to invalidate the group's nominating petitions. This struggle is undecided, may continue over the next several weeks and could eventually be decided by the courts.
By seeking a place on the ballot, these democracy reformers come to the table with a very important agenda. Crosspartisan reforms and more choice are vital to opening democracy avenues for all citizens – whether they be upstate or downstate, Republican, Democrat or independent. Victory by the status quo – pushing them off the ballot – means true democracy reform will be once again kicked down the road.
The promise and necessity of Unite NY compel us to keep these too-hard “other things” on the front burner. This is more than just an idea. It is our well-deserved legacy. Instead of trying to snuff out these reform efforts, political forces on the right and left in New York should be working to elevate, support and maybe even join them.
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.