Sometimes, for sanity's sake, you just have to laugh at what is happening in this crazy year of very serious debates over how our elections are going to be conducted.
Maybe these two related stories out of battleground Michigan in the last few days will help — although, be forewarned, one's a bit more overtly humorous than the other.
Barb Byrum, the county clerk in Lansing, announced Friday that she had filed a criminal complaint with the local police and the Ingham County sheriff against John Pavlik of Mason, a town of about 8,500 souls about 15 miles south of the state capital.
His alleged crime: a potentially very unclean if minimal form of election fraud.
Pavlik is a retired plumber and has a lot of toilets around the house. Having followed the ongoing disputes over the propriety of voting absentee, he apparently decided to have a little fun.
So, a week ago Sunday, he placed one of his commodes in front of his house along with a large sign stating, "Place Mail in Ballots Here."
Ingham County Clerk
"I thought it would be kind of cute, a little satire to put it out on my front lawn and put the sign on it," he told a local TV station.
Byrum did not appreciate the attempt at humor and contacted the police, who soon showed up at the house to take statements from Pavlik and his wife. By Friday, Byrum, a Democrat with responsibility for a slice of election administration in a tossup state, called for the plumber to be prosecuted.
"Elections in this country are to be taken seriously and there are many people who are voting by mail for the first time," she said. "We need to put out accurate, complete information about voting by mail, which is the safest way to vote during the pandemic. That starts at the top and I worry that the misinformation coming from President Trump is encouraging people to lose faith in the absentee voting process."
She pointed out that it is a felony to take illegal possession of an absentee ballot with a maximum punishment of five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.
The county prosecutor's office has declined to pursue the case but there is no word from the Mason police department.
One little postscript: Byrum is more than prolific on social media, particularly Twitter, where she has posted more than 20,000 tweets, a good number of which highlight her frequent biking and running outings.
She posted this in a tweet on Saturday: "What did one fly say to the other? Is this stool taken?"
Speaking of jokes, remember that knee-slapper in which the president of the United States keeps undermining the integrity of the election — calling the impending record use of mailed ballots a sure-fire path to fraud based on, well, no evidence whatsoever?
It's such a great one that he has tweeted more than 50 times about it since April.
Well, our president, never to be constrained by his previous statements, decided on Monday to change directions — 180 degrees — at least when it comes to a state where he's trailing but counting on voters to give him 16 electoral votes.
"Attention MICHIGAN! Early voting has started AND absentee ballots are being mailed out. Take advantage of the early voting and absentee calendar. Vote in person today or request an absentee ballot here."
He then provided a link just to be helpful. (Early voting in Michigan actually doesn't start until Thursday.)
It was Trump, you may recall, who threatened to withhold fundingfrom Michigan after Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson mailed absentee ballot applications to every voter before the primary and promised to do it again before the general election.
"Mail-in ballots are very dangerous. There's tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality," he said then.
Last week the state's court of appeals ruled that Benson's actions were legal.
Maybe they were just joking.
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.