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.
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.