Somebody Has to Say It Out Loud
What’s going on, America? I keep asking that question in my office and in my car, and today I am putting it on paper because none of us gets to stay silent anymore.
We live in one of the richest and most capable nations ever built, a country that put people on the moon and still leads the world in medicine, science, farming, and invention, and somehow the process we use to choose the leader of the free world feels like a county fair raffle where every ticket in the drum got chewed by the goat before anyone reached in. That is where we are. Three hundred forty million people stand at the prize table trying to decide which option frightens them least, and I refuse to accept that as our standard.
The Man at the Microphone
I watch Donald Trump speak and feel like I am listening to a car radio stuck between two stations, where a few words of a ballgame bleed into a few words of a sermon and nobody, including the man holding the microphone, knows which broadcast comes next. Then the sentence stalls in the middle of an intersection, and the rest of us get told to wait patiently and pretend this is how a president talks.
It is bizarre.
He sits at the center of the executive branch of the United States, the largest and most consequential operation on the planet, and he seems to bounce between grudges and impulses, personal feuds and decisions nobody asked for. Nothing about that reassures me, not one bit of it. Yes, he is older, and some days I watch him and wonder whether age has caught up with him. That is my opinion as a citizen, and I make no medical diagnosis, because I am a lawyer with no neurology degree. I do have eyes and ears, and every American holds the right to look at the president and say, “Sir, what on earth was that?”
Party Colors Have Nothing to Do With This
Spare me the bumper stickers. My complaint has nothing to do with party, and it insults every one of us. A country this capable should never be steered like a cruise ship with a teenager holding a learner’s permit at the wheel, and every week I watch that ship scrape another dock and then listen to the captain blame the ocean. The trained crew is already on board. We have world class scientists, engineers, doctors, and small business owners solving impossible problems every single day, and somehow none of them ever get near the wheel. Hand it to them.
You Are the Boss
Presidents work for us. So do members of their administration. Every one of them is a public employee holding enormous authority, and we the people sit on the hiring committee, which means we should grade them the way a drill sergeant grades a new recruit on the first morning of boot camp, with no excuses accepted and no feelings spared. Somewhere along the way, we flipped that relationship upside down.
Politicians fumble, and we rush to defend them. They contradict themselves, and we write the excuses. They make decisions we hate, and we cook up theories about a hidden master plan, as if every blunder were a magic trick the rest of us lacked the ticket to understand. They embarrass the country, and grown adults sprint online like volunteer defense attorneys working the case for free, swearing their favorite politician never meant the words that came out of his own mouth.
I have watched this happen for years now. Citizenship was never supposed to mean babysitting grown adults who run the most important government on Earth. I want a president whose words arrive in one piece, like a letter in your mailbox that needs no codebreaker to read. I want a leader whose sentences stand on their own two feet without podcasters and cable news hosts propping them up. The standard isn’t complicated. Loyalty to a politician should end the moment he stops being good at the job.
What Happened in the Senate Today
Today gave every American a front row seat to exactly what I am talking about. Former special counsel Jack Smith sat before the Senate to testify. I’ve tried more cases than most, so trust me when I tell you that I know what a great lawyer looks and sounds like. On a scale of one to ten, Jack Smith is a fifteen, in his skill as a lawyer and in his ethics on the job. He laid out what the evidence showed, calmly and clearly, one fact after another. This is worth a two minute of your time.
The Republican senators across from him came with an agenda of their own. They asked him questions and then blocked him from answering. They stated things as fact that were untrue or misleading, and they said them straight into the cameras so millions of Americans would hear the spin and never hear the answer. That misled the American people. Period.
In any courtroom in this country, a lawyer who fires a question at a witness and then shouts him down every time he opens his mouth gets stopped cold by the judge. The Senate has no excuse for doing worse. A senator who silences the witness has already decided the truth is his enemy.
Every senator swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Misleading the public from a Senate hearing room breaks that oath, and the senators who did it today should face censure and expulsion. I say that as a lawyer who takes oaths seriously.
Bigger Than One Man
This sickness spreads well beyond Trump. Republicans have pitched a big top over Congress, and the fit is perfect, since the elephants have been running this show for years. The ringmaster cracks his whip at every camera in the building, and the clowns pour out of committee rooms one after another, honking their horns at any witness who tries to finish a sentence.
Governors and senators walk the high wire for applause, and House members fire themselves out of the cannon for one more viral clip, and every act ends the same way, with a deep bow toward the spotlight and a hand held out for donations. Regular Americans sit in the bleachers with a grocery receipt in their laps, doing long division over the price of a dozen eggs and wondering when anyone under that tent plans to do the job they were hired for. Every performer up there works with a safety net. We are the net.
I want excellence from the people we elect, starting with a functioning adult who speaks in complete thoughts and understands how government and the economy work. That leader should remember that tens of millions of Americans voted for someone else and still deserve a president who serves them. Public office should never become a wrecking ball swung at personal enemies.
Where the Competent People Went
America has plenty of competent people. We have them in every town, and they are busy doing real jobs. The darkest joke of all sits right there, because the people best at running complicated systems are out running them, and our politics hands the prize to whoever grabs the most eyeballs on any given night, even when that person has never managed anything bigger than a campaign mailing list.
The ones best at hard work, they stay home and do it. Attention measures noise. Competence measures results, and a slogan with no plan behind it holds up about as well as a paper umbrella in a thunderstorm. A cheering stadium proves a man is popular, and popularity has never once patched a pothole or paid a nurse. This country runs on competent people, and it is long past time we sent a few of them to Washington.
Speak Up Before More Slips Away
This country is too beautiful and too important to run like a potluck supper where nobody checked who was bringing the main course. I am done with saviors and cult leaders, done with political messiahs and celebrity strongmen. I want competent adults running the United States of America, and the fact that such a plain request now sounds radical might be the most unhinged thing going on in this country today.
Talk about today’s hearing with the people you love. Call your senators and tell them you saw what happened and you expect them to honor the oath they swore. Share this with somebody who needs to hear it, and keep asking out loud, at your dinner table and in your group chats, until the people we hired finally give us a straight answer to the question none of us will stop asking: what’s going on, America?
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Jack Smith had the courage to say what needed to be said, without hiding behind slogans or fear. He spoke plainly, directly, and with a kind of moral steadiness that’s rare in American politics right now. While others dodge, spin, or melt under pressure, he stood there and laid out the facts as they are. No theatrics, no cheap noise — just the truth delivered with a spine. That alone feels revolutionary today.
Brilliant, plain English description of what’s going on in America. I watch from afar, gobsmacked at the helplessness in the face of it. Why aren’t the people in the street letting the cabal now in charge of America know that their number is up and they will have to answer for their crimes?
There are great people like you Mitch, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, and many more exposing their horrors every day, and it looks as though the ordinary folk are just marching towards the cliff. By the time they find themselves crumpled at the bottom of the cliff it will be too late!