Greatness Through The Eyes of Goodness.

Posted on | March 5, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

For nearly a quarter century I’ve been answering the question, “Why is health political?” I will not force the “gentle reader” through that explanation one more time. But it is worth noting that no administration in my lifetime has made my point more clearly than the current one. It has forced on each of us a crash course in participatory democracy.

What’s wrong in the social science realm of health? Consider for example the mental health crises affecting teens across the nation, or the sharp decline in relationships and child bearing in young adult men and women, or the attack on vaccine policy by the wayward Kennedy, or the attempted dismantling of ACA health insurance coverage for millions, or the outright cruelty of ICE agents toward citizens and legal aliens, or the callous attitude toward Middle East casualties of soldiers and civilians by the President and the “Secretary of War”… and I could go on.

How should our nation begin to address these grievances? With our grandchildren either in or fast approaching higher education, I’ve been making a related case (as I see it) for the value and importance of a liberal arts education. In a strange way, Trump, in his attacks on the law and democracy, has instigated a resurgence of interest in history, philosophy, religion, political science, literature and the arts – even in this age of fantastical AI exuberance.

My own alma mater has been steadfast in its vision. As they state on their own website, “The liberal arts education at Le Moyne is rooted in the Jesuit tradition, which emphasizes the education of the whole person and the search for meaning and value as integral parts of an intellectual life. This commitment to a liberal arts education allows students to develop a broad range of skills and knowledge, fostering ethical leadership, service, and a commitment to social justice. The college’s Core Curriculum is central to its mission, ensuring that all students receive a thorough education in the liberal arts, which includes knowledge across multiple disciplines and the confidence to engage in intellectual inquiry as members of a global community.”

In simpler terms, LeMoyne’s front page headlines “We strive for greatness always through the eyes of goodness.” I thought of this last evening as I watched James Talarico’s speech accepting his Democratic Primary nomination for Senate in Texas. In part explaining his convincing victory numbers as a result of his ability to attract a large turnout of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, he issued what will certainly be his rallying cry: “The people of this state have given this country a little bit of hope, and a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing.”

Who is in danger? Talarico has tagged not only billionaires, but especially Christian Nationalists who he says “divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so that we don’t notice that they’re defunding our schools, gutting our health care and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It is the oldest strategy in the world: Divide and conquer. But we will not be conquered.”

This week CUNY Political Scientist, Peter Beinart, laid out a remarkable opinion piece in the New York Times, leaning heavily on liberal arts to make a convincing case against empire building and king Trump. In opposing national sovereignty and international law conventions, he spotlights the President’s source of guidance – “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Beinart bolsters his case against Trump by digging deep into our own history, political science, literature and religion. Included in the journey are President William McKinley (intent on Caribbean Empire building), and his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who claimed McKinley’s action “is not a step forward toward a broader destiny; it is a step backward, toward the narrow views of kings and emperors.” John Quincy Adams appears in 1821 stating such purposeful aggressions would undermine “the fundamental maxims of American policy (and) would insensibly change (democratic practice) from liberty to force.”

Others come forward as well including Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Kenneth Galbraith. Taken into account Beinart’s impressive essay and Talarico’s acceptance speech, side by side in a short 24 hours, reminds us all that the soul of our democracy requires health, unity, and the capacity to awaken “our better angels.”

To paraphrase the LeMoyne motto, our greatness must flow from our goodness. The core of a well educated electorate is knowledge, wisdom, and values. In its absence, we are left with ignorance, greed, and hatred.

The Blurry Line Between Tolerance and Rejection

Posted on | February 23, 2026 | No Comments

Mike Magee

Are you for us, or against us? Will you tolerate border incursions, or deter, destroy, and extract? Will you bend (and how far) to accommodate your former enemies and betray your friends?

These questions may sound provocative and political, but they have nothing to do with our current leadership disarray in the U.S. Rather they refer to an active scientific debate raging in the field of Immunology. As one scientist noted recently, “Immunologists generally view the notion of self and non-self as part of a broader, more contextual understanding of immune function, rather than a rigid dogma.”

For nearly a century, experts in the field leaned heavily on the belief that “self” was static and concrete rather than a “context-dependent state.” In the 19th century, the debate was as likely to engage philosophers and theologians, as it did biologists and mathematicians. The consensus back then was that the human organism was committed to identifying and preserving its cells and vital chemicals, which required means to identify and destroy any entities (dead or alive) that penetrated human space.

But what does it mean to be “oneself?” Until recently most experts leaned on concrete boundaries and substrates. Yet recent forays into the biologic underpinnings of memory and consciousness suggested that human life is dynamic, interactive, and evolutionary.

At the dawn of the 20th century scientists theorized that serum proteins had the capacity to identify specific biologic molecules. In time, they were revealed as highly organized and responsive systems including the complement cascade and a range of immunoglobulins or antibodies.

In response to war injuries in WW II, attempted transplantation led to tissue rejection, and in response the discovery of individual specific Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) and Major Histocompatibility Complexes (MHC) – “self-markers” if you will that added a piece to the puzzle and triggered a “convergence of ideas.” Frank Macfarlane Burnet is credited with first uncovering that lymphocytes play a critical role as immune mediators. They posses special receptors on their cell surface capable of recognizing and binding foreign proteins. Each replicating clone of lymphocytes is specific to one invader. Once bound, “the forbidden clone” is marked for destruction and digestion. One’s own proteins are not bound, and therefore not destroyed.

In the late 1980’s, Charles Janeway, suggested that our immune system wasn’t so much focused on random invading protein antigens, but rather reliant on receptors that existed on the surface of innate white blood cells that had memory and had evolved and been inherited and handed down through generations. This tipped the scale away from the classical two-phase definition of our cellular and humoral defense department that included an initial general innate response followed by a second target specific adaptive strike when necessary.

The newer still evolving theory envisions an innate system with swagger that is based on “ancient pattern recognition” embedded with evolutionary knowledge of what is dangerous, and what is not. This newer vision includes a higher level of tolerance and understanding extended to certain “foreign elements” that mean no harm. This subtle shift redefines the role of the immune soldier, once a border cop, but now a transit manager.

Why the new emphasis on plasticity? Because reality was not cooperating with classically held beliefs. For some time researchers were aware for example that fetal cells that escaped into a mother’s circulation could continue to thrive, unattacked as foreign for a lifetime. The mothers “foreign cells” suggested a “fetal-maternal tolerance” termed microchimerism. That same type of free pass was also extended to consensual microbiome bacteria that appeared integrated into endocrine and neurologic control systems. And finally, in the field of transplant immunology, it became possible to use modified pharmacologic intervention to prod the recipient’s defense system to grudgingly accept foreign tissue that had been partially, but not completely matched to a recipient’s tissue type.

The field of Immunology is just catching up with the reality that we humans are willing hosts of trillions of microbes. How exactly they get a “stay out of jail” card remains a mystery for the moment. But one thing is certain, they are critical to our normal physiologic functioning. And the reverse is true as well, that the immune response can be “pathologically misdirected” with cataclysmic over response as in “anaphylaxis,” or chronic self-destructive inflammatory cascades as in the case of autoimmune diseases such as hemolytic anemia or rheumatoid arthritis.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: ancient pattern recognition > burnet > forbidden clone > HLA > immunoglobulins > immunology > janeway > MHC > non-self > protein tags > rejection > self > tolerance

Is “Self vs. Non-Self” in Immunology as iron-clad as we thought?

Posted on | February 17, 2026 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

In 1872, English mathematician and sometimes poet, Augustus de Morgan, wrote this catching rhyme: “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”

This truism about competition among species for access to nutrition and reproduction could have come in handy to Napoleon 60 years earlier when he tragically underestimated his enemies will to live. It wasn’t so much the stubborn Russians as it was microbes that were his undoing.

When he launched his invasion with a staggering force of 615,000 men, 200,000 horses, and 1,372 mobile guns, he appeared unstoppable. But on his way to Moscow, (according to Tolstoy’s account of the misadventure in “War and Peace”) he lost 130,000 men to Shigella dysentery. Confronted with harsh weather and a Russian force that refused to engage in defense of Moscow, Napoleon lost 2/3 of his remaining retreating force to Typhus, carried by Rickettsia prowazekki, housed in body lice embedded in his soldiers rancid clothing.

Under more favorable circumstances, the soldiers immune systems would have been their ally. Human bioengineering has evolved side by side with pathogenic microbes determined to chemically out smart their human hosts.

Humans rely on innate and adaptive mechanisms to detect and destroy pathogens. But to do so while sparing their own cells, they must be able to distinguish self from non-self. And they must adapt and remember, producing long-lived immune cells and protein receptors that allow them to “capture” and destroy repeat offenders.

If the system experiences a breakdown in self-tolerance, the protective processes may over-shoot and result in a chronic inflammatory response that destroys healthy tissues and marks the emergence of auto-immune diseases.

One special circumstance where immuno-tolerance is both normal and essential is maternal self-suppression during pregnancy which allows two separate immunologic organisms to survive intimate relations side-by-side.

At four weeks of pregnancy, the tiny developing fetus is already developing cells that will ultimately differentiate into immune blood cells. By the third month of pregnancy, these cells are traveling through blood channels to the liver, spleen and thymus. Some of them – B cells from bone marrow, and T-cells in the thymus – are already functional, but not needed. the womb is sterile. By 19 weeks, immune cells have also been distributed to intestinal lymph nodes.

Mothers and babies are not identical genetically. And yet the mother’s immune system spares the developing fetal cells. While housed in the sterile womb, fetal cells don’t require an active immune system of their own. Also by the fourth or fifth week of developing, the fetus has seeded the mother’s circulatory system with fetal cells, and these are tolerated and not rejected as foreign. Studies have shown that up to 0.1% of a mother’s adult cells may genetically map to her child. This is termed “microchimerism.”

As long as the child is in-utero, its immune system sleeps, and the mother tolerates her exposure to occasional fetal cells as benign and acceptable. All that changes at birth.

The newborn child is “immunogenically naive” and at risk as he/she passes through the bacterial rich vaginal canal. That is not to say the child is weapon-less. Beginning at 13 weeks, mothers antibodies have been crossing over the placenta into the fetus. By late in the 3rd trimester, these are abundant. The mother’s breast milk/colostrum is also rich in antibodies, and immunologically actives cells, granules, and enzymatic fluids. These provide immediate short-lived immune protection, and a chance to catch-up. But the supply of fast responding neutrophils is limited in this two-month process, and the newborn is vulnerable to a range of infections, most especially Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, Klebsiella , Hemophilis influenza and Meningococcus.

When the baby’s immune system kicks in (after 2 months), every pathogen is brand new. It has no memory until adaptive immunity (in the form of B and T-cell lymphocytes) generates specific immunoglobulin antibodies and receptors that can tag future invaders for destruction. This is why pediatricians instruct new parents that any fever before two months of age requires immediate examination.

It is fair to say that a great deal remains to be understood in the field of immunology. But researchers believe that further study of fetal immunity could unleash an array of new discoveries. “Tolerance to the fetal allograft” carries a great deal of academic interest for sure. But understanding the intricate chemical and physiologic systems that make this possible, many believe, could lead to clinical breakthroughs in cancer therapy, management of auto-immune disease, and avoidance of degenerative inflammatory diseases that accompany aging.

Increasingly, leading research immunologists are challenging the very foundations of self identity that have anchored the discipline. Consider these words directed at the long held theory of “self vs. non-self” from a May, 2025 publication in Frontiers in Immunology:

“Its partial obsolescence is, in fact, a tribute to how far immunology has come. As we move into deeper explorations of microbiome-immune interactions and epigenetic plasticity, the field will undoubtedly continue to change. The fundamental question of how an organism maintains its integrity in an ever-changing environment of microbes, tissues, and signals remains as relevant as ever, but the answers we seek must match the complexity and dynamism of biological reality. If this means embracing the ‘end of a dogma,’ it also heralds the dawn of a more integrative immunological science.”

Are humans smart enough to figure this all out? Maybe not.

But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who used to be a biomedical researcher, switched over to AI to give humans the edge over Augustus de Morgan’s fear. As he recently said, “One of the observations that I most had when I worked in that field was the incredible complexity of it…And I had this sense of: Man, this is too complicated for humans. We’re making progress on all these problems of biology and medicine, but we’re making progress relatively slowly….So what drew me to the field of A.I. was this idea of: Could we make progress more quickly?”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: adaptive immunity > augustus de morgan > fetal immune system > immunology > microchimerism > non-self > self > war and peace

Bad Bunny’s Valentine Card To All Americans.

Posted on | February 10, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Bad Bunny came to the rescue, and 135 million citizens worldwide were ready and waiting for relief. A 13 minute oasis, and WOW – the power of culture in the hands of a gifted artist. The human sugar cane set, ravaged electric grid but heads held high, joyful music and dance, choice to go all in on Spanish and multigenerational love, and “God Bless Our Americas” with a multi-flag flying exit – all memorable and directional (Good hearts everywhere, follow us!)

That was Sunday. And what a lead-in to this Saturday’s Valentines Day. As Bad Bunny’s (AKA Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) flag-waving brown, black, and white band redefined the boundaries of America The Beautiful, the electronic billboard challenged ICE and beyond in full caps – “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”

Bad Bunny carried the football that read “TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA”. But who threw the pass? One obvious candidate would be Sonia Maria Sotomayor, the first Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice. She is the child of Puerto Rican immigrants. Two years after she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, her father, who spoke only Spanish and had a 3rd grade education, died. Her mother was an orphan from a rural area on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast. She emigrated to New York City during WW II and served as a practical nurse in the Women’s Army Corp. Working long hours to raise her daughter, much of Sonia’s support came from her grandmother who she said provided “protection and purpose,” and from their large extended family they would visit in Puerto Rico each summer.”

At her swearing in on May 26, 2009, President Obama referenced her knowledge of the law and vast experience, but then added, “We need something more… Experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune, experience insisting, persisting, and ultimately, overcoming those barriers. It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”

That common touch was on full display with Benito and his joyful troop this past weekend. It was present as well on June 30, 2022, when another woman of color was tracing the same steps as Justice Sotomayor. Her name means “lovely one”, and when she was appointed to her current role, she said, “I have dedicated my career to public service because I love this country and our Constitution and the rights that make us free.”

The “lovely one” was born in Washington, D.C. on September 14, 1970. To honor their ancestry, her parents, whose ancestors were slaves, reached out to a relative who was serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa at the time, requesting a list of African names for their daughter

Ketanji Onyika was their choice. It is Tshiluba, a Bantu language from a southern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to experts, “The language is rich in proverbs, such as ‘Bilengele mbiasa munkelende’ (Good things are found among thorns), reflecting deep cultural wisdom.” One word in the language speaks volumes. For example: Ilunga – a very complicated word to translate and useful in our current circumstances. “It means ‘a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time’.”

As with Benito last Sunday, human goodness and endurance, love and joy, were on full display on June 30, 2022. Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson, the new Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, had endured nearly 24 hours of rigorous, and at times deeply offensive questioning, under the glare of TV lights, to make history. Her then 11-year old daughter, Leila Jackson, recommended her in 2016, to President Obama, for a vacant position on the Supreme Court left by the death of Justice Scalia. Leila wrote of her mother, “She is determined, honest, and never breaks a promise to anyone, even if there are other things she’d rather do. She can demonstrate commitment, and is loyal and never brags.”

So we will brag for her, and Justice Sotomayer, for Benito and Puerto Rico and for all our Americas in all their splendid diversity.

As for the football that Bad Bunny spiked in the end zone, according to chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, it was a vintage Wilson ball from the late ’60s. And Benito’s #64 white jersey? It was a tribute to his uncle. He played football and that was his number. McCarthy spoke for us all when he said, “It was a great gesture. Family is everything, and it’s nice to see that even the world’s biggest stars remain cognizant of who and where they came from.”

Happy Valentines Day to Americans of good will everywhere!

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: bad bunny > Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio > god bless our americas > ketanji brown jackson > lovely one > Obama > puerto rico > sonia sotomayor > super bowl > the only thing more powerful than hate is love > together we are america > trump

Reality Bites Trump and His Cabinet.

Posted on | February 3, 2026 | 3 Comments

Gemini Image

Mike Magee

In the 1994 classic movie, Reality Bites, college graduate and fledgling documentary film maker Winona Ryder forms a troubled bond with a troop of characters that includes GAP sales associate, Janeane Garofalo, who may have HIV; Steve Zahn who struggles to figure out how to tell his parents he’s gay; Ben Stiller, sometime lover of Winona; and Ethan Hawke who is falling apart in front of our eyes. As one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer noted, “In a picture full of painful moments, it’s hard to decide on the lowest point.”

Those words fit as well for the current political drama Americans have been forced to endure. Trump and Bannon and Miller, Kristi Noem and her ICE storm troopers, and JD Vance with a full range of supportive sycophants, religously play out their roles. And the peoples iPhone cameras are always rolling.

But none of this is new. As far back as January 27, 2017, Trump signed his first executive order. It banned travel to the United States for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The action was temporarily blocked by court injunctions. But on June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 opinion, gave the order a green light and even allowed an expansion of the list to include Venezuela and North Korea. By 2020, Trump added Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

Trump’s explanation: “As President, I must act to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people.” But his henchman, Bannon, was more forthcoming, publicly acknowledging that this was an intended “shock event.”

At the time, Boston College historian and political scientist, Heather Cox Richardson made this observation which continues to ring true today: “Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order…When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies.”

Steve Bannon may not be in the White House these days. But he’s never gone away. In the immediate wake of the ICE murder last week of ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, he boldly declared “He knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”

It’s only been a year or so since Bannon was released from his Danbury, CT, federal jail cell where he spent 4 months for Contempt of Congress. On the eve of his imprisonment, on July 1, 2024, Trump telegraphed what would happen next when he stated, “They wanted to silence him, but they’ll never silence him, but they wanted to silence him. Oh, this is pure weaponization. What they’ve done in this country is unthinkable, and Biden is going to pay a big price for it.”

Turns out that “reality bites.” After serving his 4 month term, in February, 2025, Bannon was forced to plead guilty to charges of fraud and conspiracy related to a financial scam in his “We Build The Wall” campaign. He was also barred from main stream social media platforms, but has reemerged with his “War Room” podcast targeted at the hardest core MAGA supporters.

The program has the partial support of Trump’s followers, and Bannon maintains a love/hate relationship with top Trump administration high rollers like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Still his brand of “truth telling” still travels well in and among his conspiracy prone audience. Recently, the Brookings Institute examined 79 political podcasts and found that 70% of Bannon’s programs contained false information, exceeding both Glenn Beck and Charlie Kirk at the time.

In an effort to reach a larger audience, he’s moving the podcast to Texas this month, he says, to focus on the Texas primary March 3rd. He’s no stranger to the state. On January 9th, he hosted an all day “oldie but goodie” conference and dinner in Grapevine, Texas, titled “Save Texas from Radical Islam”. It is indeed a period filled with “painful moments”, and one where “it is hard to decide on the lowest point.”

And yet, this week’s surprising Texas state Senate seat win by Democrat Taylor Rehmet suggests this modern day version of the classic film may still have a happy (2026 Midterms) ending.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Bannon > brookings > Heather Cox Richardson > immigration > JD Vance > Marco Rubio > radical islam > Shock Event > ted cruz > trump > War Room

Trump’s AI-Enabled Autocracy

Posted on | January 28, 2026 | 1 Comment

Listen HERE

Mike Magee

This week, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, did it again – scaring the bejesus out of societal leaders worldwide with warnings that their grip on security and governance of human populations is dangerously close to AI extinction.

Amodei’s opening paragraph in his article titled “The Adolescence of Technology” wastes no time getting the reader’s attention. He writes, “There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, ‘If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?’ Her reply is: ‘I’d ask them, How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?’”

Now, I should be clear. I was already nervous. As a Medical Historian, preparing for a major lecture on the birth of Immunology this Spring, I’ve been researching the field. What am I looking for? The same thing I always find missing when exploring the frontiers of scientific progress – historical context. In most cases, facts and figures abound, but their impact on the complex web of human relations over the years is often missing.

Amodei is attempting to provide that context in real time. Real times include headlines like this one from the New York Times: “ICE Already Know Who Protesters Are “ from AI powered facial recognition technology . But Amodei’s concerns are more fundamental. The challenge for him is the speed of change with generative AI which he clearly states is alarming. As he says, “Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Clearly with Musk’s recent DOGE foray in mind, Amodei lays out a pretty plausible modern day vulnerability. He says, “It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves. AI companies control large datacenters, train frontier models, have the greatest expertise on how to use those models, and in some cases have daily contact with and the possibility of influence over tens or hundreds of millions of users.”

Getting a bit more specific without outright naming Musk-controlled Grok and X, Amodei leaves little doubt who he’s referring to when he says, “Some AI companies have shown a disturbing negligence towards the sexualization of children in today’s models, which makes me doubt that they’ll show either the inclination or the ability to address autonomy risks in future models.”

At one point during the ICE offenses last week, a legal observer in Portland, Maine, filming an ICE agent, was approached by the agent who had just filmed her car and was now filming her face. Asking why he was doing that, the ICE agent replied, “Cuz we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.”

The activities of the past week, and the unprovoked murders of two innocent US citizens make Amodei’s final warning prescient. He says,“Current autocracies are limited in how repressive they can be by the need to have humans carry out their orders, and humans often have limits in how inhumane they are willing to be. But AI-enabled autocracies would not have such limits.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AI > anthropic > autocracy > dario amodei > grok > ICE > Musk > stephen miller > trump > X

Trump v. Lincoln

Posted on | January 22, 2026 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

In the early days of 2026, we Americans find ourselves confronted by three undeniable realities: an obviously impaired President in his second term, a vaulted democracy with checks and balances that are struggling to rise to the autocratic challenge, and an ICE army of state invaders which appears ready to trigger a second Civil War. In short, conditions of distress for the American Democracy have radically escalated.

During the first Trump administration, there was serious debate over the use of the 25th Amendment to deal with the “Trump Problem.” On May 16, 2017, New York Times conservative columnist, Russ Douthat, wrote “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.”

Let’s look at four archived slides from the 2017 lecture, and then discuss our current options in the case of 2026 Trump against Democracy.

Slide 1. Russ Douthat

In 2017, Scott Bomboy, chief of the National Constitution Center, wrote:

“Section 4 is the most controversial part of the 25th Amendment: It allows the Vice President and either the Cabinet, or a body approved ‘by law’ formed by Congress, to jointly agree that ‘the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ This clause was designed to deal with a situation where an incapacitated President couldn’t tell Congress that the Vice President needed to act as President.”

Had our leaders followed Russ Douthat’s advice nine years ago, it is highly unlikely that a 2/3rds majority of both chambers of Congress would have had their back. Instead, they went for Impeachment and failed, as Republicans chose rather to let voters decide. And they did, in 2020. Few likely envisioned that a malignant defeated candidate would launch a January 6th insurrection, embolden white nationalists militia (now ICE) across the nation, and follow thru on threats to run and win a 2nd term in 2024.

The 25th Amendment is no more a solution today than it was in 2017. Instead citizens loyal to our form of government rely in 2026 on two protective backstops:

Our third pillar of government – The Courts (most especially the Supreme Court.)
The voter, whose second day of reckoning fast approaches with the Mid-Term elections only 10 months away. In the interim, we now must physically engage and resist at every turn.

Some believe we are once again engaged in a great Civil War. In its’ summary of the Gettysburg Address, National Geographic states that “Despite (or perhaps because of) its brevity, since (Abraham Lincoln’s) speech was delivered, it has come to be recognized as one of the most powerful statements in the English language and, in fact, one of the most important expressions of freedom and liberty in any language.”

The last paragraph of that two minute speech, delivered now 162 years and two months ago, reminds us that Renee Nicole Good and other Americans are now dying on “a new battlefield” defending our democratic government against a home bred army. Lincoln’s words today are more relevant than ever.

As described by historians, Lincoln made it clear that the stakes could not have been higher, well before Trump’s mobilization of ICE or his efforts to destroy NATO this week. The battle in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and now in states throughout our nation, simply mirrors the struggle for “a new birth of freedom” with “equality for all.”

As they were spoken, November 19, 1863, here are Lincoln’s final words, ones that deserve a most careful reading: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”