Sex sells, as everyone knows. But it also can be used to promote our sometimes struggling democracy, as two recent examples illustrate. Literally.
The first comes in the shapely form of Kylie Jenner, the 23-year-old member of the Jenner-Kardashian entertainment-celebrity industrial complex.
Jenner posted a pair of bikini-clad photos of herself on Instagram this week, with a link to vote.org, asking fans if they were registered and inviting her 197 million followers: "let's make a plan to vote together." She posted something similar on Twitter, where she has more than 35 million followers.
The response: Vote.org reports her link boosted traffic by 1,500 percent and resulted in 48,000 people registering to vote.
The moment "speaks to an energy among young Americans who want to make sure their voices are heard this election," Vote.org chief Andrea Hailey said in a statement.
Alternatively, it may just speak to people who want to appreciate what Kylie Jenner's wearing while soaking in the California sun.
The second example comes from much less warm Pennsylvania, where a few local politicians have shed even more clothing to focus the electorate's attention on so-called "naked ballots."
These are absentee votes that get delivered to election offices inside the pre-addressed outer return envelope — but not sealed inside the required second, secrecy envelope.
This happened thousands of times in the June primary, but the state Supreme Court ruled those naked ballots should be counted anyway. The court has taken a different position for the presidential election: Anyone who makes the same mistake this fall will be out in the cold, without a vote that counts.
Democrats are now working hard to educate voters in one of the premier presidential battlegrounds about the importance of "clothing" their mail ballots in the inner sleeve — especially because so many are expected to be voting by mail for the first time this year because of the pandemic. One party official has sounded the alarm that 100,000 ballots will otherwise get discarded because of their nakedness, twice President Trump's margin in the state last time.
In the most dramatic gesture of this education effort, two members of the Allegheny County Council in Pittsburgh and an incoming state legislator posed for a waist-up group photo — apparently unclothed but for the absentee ballots covering their chests.
They tweeted the shot with panels of text explaining the three easy steps for properly returning a mailed-in ballot.
"Immediately when I heard the term naked ballots, and being a woman in the male-dominated environment of politics, where they are always trying to control our bodies, I thought, 'Why not take some control back? And also get the voters' attention," one of the council members, Bethany Hallam, told the Guardian.
The gesture has worked, sort of: More than 1,500 retweets and 3,600 "likes" so far. Not Kardashian-class numbers, but still.
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.