Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
This has been a tough week. Well let’s be honest, it has been a tough decade or more. As society and our lives increase in their challenges and complexity, it’s hard not to blame others and/or despair that the lives we have are not the lives we want. This is occurring at multiple levels in my life, right now.
At a personal level, a family member is attached to an old conversion van which to him represents freedom and self-sufficiency on his adventures. For me, it’s a resource drain. The choice to repair or sell is easy from a financial standpoint, harder for the person who believes in the meaning beyond the money for what this van represents.
At the professional level, I consider human needs and financial resources when making decisions. This is contrary to much of American culture, which defaults to what I call “the perverted golden rule.” You might recognize it as “the man with the gold, rules.” This belief shifts power to the person with the most money or influence. People lose or give away their own agency. I struggle to release this cultural idea. It’s a belief found in most people of all socio-economic backgrounds. From my viewpoint, it leads to dehumanization of ourselves and others. What is the antidote? We don’t yet know.
At the political level, we are experiencing spasms of generational changes. As younger people speak up, those who’ve held power overreact with force instead of addressing the needs in front of them. The critique by our younger colleagues is heard as an accusation instead of an offer to create a better future. And of course, the perverted golden rule reigns throughout our politics.
Of course, we do have difficult choices to make. As humans, we put off these decisions until all other options are exhausted. We are forced to choose a direction for our future, focusing on a handful of possibilities while closing off many others. It’s one way we find clarity about what really matters to us.
It’s time to make difficult choices.
If we stay on the current path where we swing power back-and-forth between the Democrats and Republicans in power, we continue the pendulum swing with one party obstructing the other, and no real advancement. For some, this may seem a victory, if they want the government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, let’s say. But for others there’s a challenge because we actually need the government to work; to solve societal issues that are not the work of for-profit businesses. The so-called free market has no interest in helping where there is no profit to be made. In fact, many of our shared challenges in society have causality in our desire for profit over caring for our neighbors. This is not an either/or proposition. We have the creativity to excel AND care. We lack the beliefs and imagination to do so.
One of the things I have long admired about my Republican colleagues, is their understanding that difficult choices must be made, and their willingness to make those choices. Where I disagree with my Republican colleagues is on their denial about the impact of white-centered society on everyone. The attack of more and increased awareness that we have multiple perspectives that are different from the majority culture—identified as woke and cancel culture—has been vilified and causes harm.
One of the things I have long admired in my Democratic colleagues is their big heart and desire to help others, to create a society where everyone has a fair chance to succeed. Where I disagree with my Democratic colleagues, is their identification of the government as the only tool to create that society. When government is the only solution, it becomes an avenue of corruption and grift. Solutions can be found in civil society and the free market, too.
What both of the major party structures fail to see is how complementary they are to one another. And how their attempt at dominating the other party has led us to obstruction for the sake of not giving the other team a win. And that leads me back to difficult choices that must be made in the near future. How might we make decisions with an open heart full of compassion? Balancing the needs of our national budget AND the people impacted.
My personal difficult choice is helping my partner detach from his beloved conversion van. He’s been on a cross-country trip for five weeks, and the van has broken down five times, stranding him in various locations. He loves this van. While it represents freedom and self sufficiency, that is obviously not true.
In the nonprofit sector, our difficult choices involve time spent raising the funds to do the work that is needed. What is the correct balance of raising money and doing the actual work? Which metrics will allow our humanity to shine through and not be just another number on a spreadsheet? Nonprofits pick up the societal tasks that are not profitable, but need to be done. As the philanthropic industry continually examines effectiveness, challenging and changing beliefs in what impact is and who gets to decide, the nonprofit organizations are forced to change their operations; to make difficult choices. Sometimes those choices result in something more efficient and lean. Sometimes they result in the death of an idea. Sometimes it brings a rebirth or an all new direction.
On our national level, ironically our elected officials face a challenge similar to nonprofits. Our current election cycles demand office holders and candidates spend 70-90% of their time raising money. So when an issue before them may impact their ability to remain in power, is it any wonder they often choose the side of their campaign contributor? Or we, the citizens, punish them for voting with “the other side.” Yet, for us to have a thriving, just and healthy democratic republic we must find the balance between humanitarian interests and financial interests; and who knows we just might find that the two are not mutually exclusive. To do this we must make the difficult choice to reward cross-partisan actions.
As we make decisions about the direction of our future country, will we choose to make difficult choices with kindness and compassion? Or will we choose the most expedient choices, looking for efficiencies, like a business leader, looking for profits? However, many business leaders realize that people are more than numbers on a spreadsheet and that compassion and caring can actually increase profits. Again the two are not mutually exclusive. We need to know we are valued as human beings. We need to feel connected to each other in a way that is helpful to our lives and to others. If we are to bring about the promise that is the United States of America, we must find the balance between our financial interests and our shared humanity.
Or to put it more bluntly, our difficult choices will determine whether we continue this path of dehumanization of each other, which will increase our nation's fracturing and ongoing conflict.
I hope we choose a different path. One that lets go of our attachment to the nostalgia of a better past. I hope we choose to acknowledge the full and complete history of our nation; the good, the bad and the ugly. I hope we choose to see each other as fellow citizens, with whom we may agree or disagree and yet we respect them anyway. I hope we make the difficult choice to move towards a more perfect union.
Anything less, and the dream and promise of America will surely die.
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.