THE BLACK-AND-WHITE SITCOM THAT EXPLAINS TRUMP

I know I'm supposed to believe that Donald Trump has dementia, but this is Trump being clear-headed and sane -- or as clear-headed and sane as he's capable of being:

After four weeks of useless threats, bombings, and death, President Trump is placing a five-day pause on his war on Iran after failing to attain the “unconditional surrender” that he claimed he would earlier this month.

“I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST,” Trump wrote Monday morning on Truth Social.

Trump sees himself as a world-bestriding dictator, but he fears the financial markets, and this was a precision-timed effort to appease them.

The announcement came just two hours before U.S. stock markets opened, and Trump noted the pause in strikes will last the duration of the trading week. The decision caused previously skyrocketing oil prices to dip significantly.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more than 650 points as I type this, so it's working.

Trump threatened Iran and Iran made Trump blink, as The Bulwark's Andrew Egger notes:

... Iran appears not to have taken Trump’s threats to target their domestic power generation very seriously. Taken on their merits, these threats were astonishing: a 48-hour deadline for Iran to surrender its primary point of geopolitical leverage, or suffer widespread strikes against civilian infrastructure. But while such strikes would have been catastrophic for Iran, they would have been terrible for America, too, sending the price of oil spiraling into the stratosphere for God knows how long....

How thin did Trump’s bluff turn out to be? The president didn’t even wait until his 48-hour deadline was expiring to call it off. He blinked with twelve hours to spare—ensuring that the entire threat period took place while markets were closed over the weekend....

All the madman posturing in the world can’t change this simple fact: Iran knows how badly Trump needs to get the oil-price situation under control. Again and again, Trump has signaled he will let other foreign-policy objectives fall by the wayside to address this major domestic concern.

To me, Trump's capitulation is a sign of sanity, or at least sanity Trump-style. I realize that his decision to create the crisis that this capitulation is intended to solve seems like evidence of delusional madness. It is -- but I don't think it's dementia madness.

Here's my view: Trump has a more or less healthy brain, but he can't stop trying to do things he can't pull off. He's essentially Ralph Kramden from the old sitcom The Honeymooners, except he's Ralph Kramden with obscene wealth, fame, and, now, the nuclear launch codes.

We always saw Ralph Kramden with his mind on fire, absolutely certain that his latest get-rich-quick scheme was foolproof. As president in his second term, Trump actually is getting rich corruptly -- but what makes the synapses in his brain fire excessively is the idea that he can transform America, the America, and the world, through cockamamie schemes that are either doomed to failure or likely to improve nothing. Tariffs! Regime change in Venezuela! Expelling every undocumented immigrant in America, starting with the most sympathetic ones! Fighting the war with Iran that every previous president understandably decided was too much trouble! All of these are guaranteed to make Trump not just the greatest president ever but the most consequential person in world history!

Ralph Kramden fell for American Dream sales pitches promising easy money. Trump falls for simple political ideas, often peddled on Fox News.

I hate it here.

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— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 23, 2026 at 8:43 AM

(Source: Ben Smith at Semafor.)

Even the Iran war, as I noted yesterday, was a crazy idea sold to Trump by Rupert Murdoch and Benjamin Netantyahu, who are both much less likely to suffer blowback from it than the United States.

Trump is a crazed believer in his own brilliance. If he hadn't been born wealthy, he would have been a serial failure who couldn't quit his day job. Instead, Ralph Kramden got to be the most powerful person in the world.

LET THEM EAT HATE

In a New York Times op-ed, Phil Klay, an Iraq War veteran and author of the National Book Award-winning short story collection Redeployment, notes that the Trump administration has never offered a clear justification for the war in Iran. However:

... as I watched a video posted by the White House in which a group of angry, rifle-wielding bowling pins labeled “Iranian Regime Officials” are struck by a Stars and Stripes bowling ball that turns into an airplane, followed by actual combat footage of U.S. airstrikes, I realized how one rationale for this war has remained clear and consistent: the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.

STRIKE. 💥🦅 pic.twitter.com/XMzNNtlT63

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 12, 2026

Many top administration officials do seem to regard the brutality as an end in itself:

The bowling video is one of many sizzle reels posted on White House social media accounts celebrating the war by mixing images of death and destruction with footage from video games or sports highlights. The president declared that military officials told him “it’s more fun to sink” ships than to capture them, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exulted, “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller proclaimed that the Iran war showcased a military “that isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

At another news conference, Mr. Hegseth made the macho posturing even clearer: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

But this isn't just for their own enjoyment. They're doing it -- and proudly asserting that they're pitiless -- because they think the public will get off on the cruelty.

A portion of the public clearly is enjoying this content: the video above has 126,000 likes on X as I write this. It's all in keeping with the main message of the Republican Party for the past several decades: We are good and our enemies are pure evil. Watch us make those enemies howl in agony.

For the Republican voter base, the war doesn't need a purpose. Owning the enemy is purpose enough. The GOP will never make its voters safer, healthier, more economically secure, or more able to obtain employment, but it will talk about enemies incessantly, and let the base revel in how it's tormenting those enemies. And even when the enemies are overseas, all roads lead back to the ultimate enemy:

Enemy 1) Foreign autocracy Enemy 2) Domestic opposition party

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— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 22, 2026 at 8:36 AM

(The Truth Social post is here.)

On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump claimed that no foreign regime was a greater enemy than Democrats -- for instance, in a Fox News town hall less than a month before the election:

“I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said, adding: “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”

Over several decades, the right-wing media has primed the GOP voter base to hate everyone who's not aligned with the Republican Party, whether it's truly bad actors like the Iranian regime or a high school teacher driving a used hybrid with a COEXIST bumper sticker. So this Bloomberg report comes as no surprise:

Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran was partly motivated by pressure from outside allies....

Those privately pressing Trump to strike Iran included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some conservative commentators, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The News Corp. founder communicated with Trump several times as he urged the president to take on Tehran, according to one person briefed on their interactions.

We knew about Netanyahu and commentators such as Mark Levin. We didn't know about Murdoch -- but of course he'd be rooting for what a war he assumed would goose Fox's ratings, give Trump a boost in the polls, and rally voters around Republican candidates in the midterms, all while distracting voters from their own concerns, particularly the economy. It's not achieving most of those aims, but that's always been the Fox/GOP formula: reminding the rubes that the right will give them satisfying enemies to hate, and will show those enemies squealing whenever possible.

(Please note that the top administration cheerleaders for the war, Trump and Hegseth, are former Fox commentators, along with Miller, who got into politics as a regular talk radio caller while he was still in high school.)

Klay writes:

Our greatest wartime leaders thought we should wage war only when it was absolutely necessary, that we should articulate the clear moral and political objectives that we use to guide our strategy and that we should treat the shedding of blood with the seriousness it deserves.

Power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, cruelty is not the same as strength, and a politics built on such ideas promises ruin, delusion about the limits of our power and a betrayal of the promise of our founding.

Yeah, but it gives 40 percent of the electorate a lot of distracting dopamine hits, and that's worked out great for the GOP and the Murdoch press so far.

GENDER INSECURITIES BECOME POLICY

I think Jamelle Bouie is right to argue that Trumpism is very much about gender.

I've done a few videos at this point on a particular theme, and that theme is that everything is gender. What this means is that so much of what is driving our politics today is an acute form of gender anxiety, expressed by those who believe in a kind of hierarchical gender universe in which men are at the top, in which a particular kind an expression of masculinity is deemed to be dominant, in which femininity is disparaged, in which women are disparaged, in which anything that threatens this particular vision of domineering hierarchical masculinity is something to be undermined, if not destroyed outright.

Bouie sees this in the context of President Trump's mad plan to spend a billion dollars to bribe renewal energy companies so they won't build wind farms, at a time when the supply of fossil fuels is threatened by Trump's Iran war. Why the obsession with fossil fuels? Bouie says (at approximately 2:26 in the video):

... clean energy, renewable energy, energy that you produce not through extraction, right? Not through the violent extraction, through literally abusing the land, through literally penetrating the land, right? That's what an oil drill does: it penetrates the land....

For the people in this administration, I believe, I think that they view clean energy and renewable energy as a fundamental threat to their vision of a hierarchical world, to their vision of a hypermasculine, hierarchical world in which the only real law is the law of the strong dominating the weak, and they see renewables, green energy, as representing weakness, as representing femininity, which they equate with weakness.

I agree that masculinity is important to them -- but (and I think Bouie would agree) it's not just male vs. female. It's also macho male vs. non-macho male. I'm seeing this in right-wing memes, like these two:

Liberalism is embodied in a foul-smelling, pot-bellied brony who's clearly inferior to the ripped, iron-pumping Christian embodiment of the Trump zeitgeist. The message is not just that men are better than women, but that right-wing men are better than left-wing men, who are flabby pseudo-men.

But much of this posturing is right-wing men trying to persuade themselves that they're the guy on the right and not the guy on the left.

Here's a thread from Derek Guy. The first post features a clip of the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles talking to a manosphere influencer named Justin Waller (the clip appears in Louis Theroux's documentary Inside the Manosphere). The second post shows the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh:

It's interesting how The Daily Wire attacks the idea that gender is a performance when their sets are all about gender performance. Look at the aesthetics here — the cigars and crystal decanter with Japanese whiskey, the black dress shirt, the tight suit with two-toned double monks and tie bar ...

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— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

... the Arne Jacobsen egg chair teamed with leather couch and a studio backdrop feat. a Lambo inexplicably inside the room. And where Knowles's set is filled with masculine urban cliches, Walsh's set is the rustic counterpart: the fish, stone fireplace, and boat-shaped shelf with tiny old books.

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— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

Just feels like every material representation of masculinity for 12 year old boys, all crammed into a tiny digital space that will fit your screen. So farcical that I don't know how anyone working on or watching this production doesn't feel like their intelligence is being insulted.

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

Guy says that what we're seeing "feels like every material representation of masculinity for 12 year old boys," but I don't think it's that. I think these are symbols associated with masculinity that allegedly elevate men above women (and above weak men) and allegedly make women flock to men, but they mostly appeal to other men. They're ways men tell one another that they're alpha males.

Waller makes a living selling this image to fans. He's buff and cocksure, so the act is convincing. Knowles and Walsh, on the other hand, don't come off as macho men at all. Nor does Trump, at the age of 79, especially carrying around a body that looks like the brony's body in the memes above.

I suspect that Trump's embrace of fossil fuels is, like so much else in his life, a form of self-soothing -- he embraces energy drilled from ground by burly men and he feels more manly, at a time when, I'm sure, his days as a headline-grabbing ladies' man are in the distant past. I also see self-soothing when Knowles puffs on that cigar and Walsh makes sure the camera angle includes that fish -- yeah, we're real men, and so are you guys if you're watching this.

This is what the dominant political party in America produces as "culture." And this is how policy gets made. It's tests of manhood that men impose on themselves to impress their fellow men. And I guess Trump thinks the war is the ultimate macho flex.

THEY'RE GETTING US READY FOR THE END OF BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Since the day after President Trump issued an executive order on birthright citizenship, I've argued that the Supreme Court will side with Trump, tossing out more than a century of precedent, which is the Federalist Society supermajority's favorite sport. I think I see signs that I'm right about this.

At the academic end of the spectrum, we have a law professor named Ilan Wurman who used to believe in birthright citizenship now arguing before Congress that not everyone born here should be citizen. Here's Wurman in 2018:

And here's Wurman now:

Should EVERYONE born in America be a citizen? Part I

Ilan Wurman testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 3/10 pic.twitter.com/S8jeQT1rLd

— rationally BASED podcast (@rationallypod) March 11, 2026

For the hoi polloi, we have the New York Post dusting off an old favorite booga-booga story:

Pregnant Chinese women have turned a tropical paradise into a maternity ward — pumping out babies who automatically become US citizens daily.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, has been flooded with so-called “birth tourists” since 2009 when then-president Barack Obama introduced a visa-waiver program for Chinese nationals.

China-watchers estimate about 1,000 companies offer birth tourism to the Northern Mariana Islands, other US overseas territories and even the US mainland. They claim a gob-smacking 1.5 million American babies are being raised in China by Chinese parents who’ve participated in birth tourism.

If this has been happening for seventeen years, why is it a story now?

It's part of what I expect to be a huge propaganda campaign to make opposition to birthright citizenship seem like the normie position. The right is very good at reducing every story to a set of purely evil villains deliberately trying to harm upstanding patriots. Your enemies are rich Chinese birth tourists is an argument they hope will work, as is Yeah, birthright citizenship might have been okay once, but not after that evil Joe Biden opened the borders, which is what another right-wing legal scholar, Adrian Vermeule, argues in this Substack post:

Nor does the putatively consistent practice of granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens provide a convincing rejoinder. What was done at a small scale in the past may have very different consequences for republican sovereignty when done at a massive scale, as has occurred in recent decades, reaching a wild crescendo in the previous administration. The change of scale itself changes the nature and import of the practice, or more accurately, different practices in different eras. Fundamental principles remain the same over time, but their application may change with circumstances.

Arguments the Supremes could use to gut birthright citizenship are being floated in right-wing academic circles, but whichever ones are used, I'm certain the fix is in and birthright citizenship is on its way out.

I suggested a couple of weeks ago that the Supremes might open the door to denaturalizations in time for the midterms. Maybe that won't happen -- but at the very least, I think the Republican partisans on the Court are assuming that Democrats on the campaign trail will declare themselves in favor of a legislative restoration of birthright citizenship, which Republicans assume will hurt Democrats with swing voters. I'm not sure how that would play. But I expect the Court to do the worst possible thing again.

A SHAMELESS WHITE HOUSE ATTEMPTS TO PROVE THAT EVERYTHING IS FINE

How do you know the White House is worried about defections from the Trump voter base? You know because stories like the two I'm about to quote are showing up in the press.

First, there's this from the New York Post:

Reports of Republican fractures over President Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran have been greatly exaggerated, according to a new poll shared exclusively with The Post Thursday.

The J.L. Partners survey showed that 83% of likely Republican voters “strongly” or “somewhat” support Operation Epic Fury, while just 9% say they “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose military action against Iran.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents say the US should continue its campaign until Iran’s military capabilities are destroyed, with 16% saying Trump should stop the war immediately.

Compared to prominent podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, both of whom have criticized the president over the Iran war, the poll found 83% of likely Republican voters trust Trump’s judgement, while just 6% place more confidence in the former Fox News hosts.

J.L. Partners is a British firm founded by two Tories. It polls Americans for the Daily Mail, where its surveys have, until recently, been more favorable to President Trump than most polls. Nate Silver, who gives J.L. Partners a B/C rating, adds four points to Trump's "disapprove" numbers to adjust for J.L.'s bias.

Nevertheless, I suspect that this poll largely reflects reality. Other pollsters, such as Quinnipiac, find that Republican voters are overwhelmingly on Trump's side -- though you'd think the numbers would be closer to 100% support in the first couple of weeks of a war started by a president of their own party.

I'd be curious to see the wording of the poll's questions in order to determine whether they skewed the results, but we can't see the survey itself because it was released exclusively to the Post, which isn't revealing many specifics.

The White House is clearly trying to manufacture consent for Trump's war on the right, out of fear that some of the base is defecting, particularly young men. And this Axios story seems like another attempt to suggest that Trump's dude-friendly administration is still very popular:

D.C.'s hottest ticket: Trump's UFC fight night

President Trump tells Axios it's the "hottest ticket that I've ever seen."

He's talking about UFC Freedom 250, the fight Trump is staging on the White House's South Lawn on June 14.

Why it matters: Donors, lobbyists, members of Congress and well-connected fans are clamoring for tickets.

Well, of course donors, lobbyists, and members of Congress are clamoring for tickets. They still need to curry favor with Trump. But Trump wants America, or at least right-wing America, or at least right-wing male America, to believe he's still "the hottest thing."

Of course, we have no idea how true any of this is -- the story, more than most Axios stories, is pure spin, and reads like spin directly from the boss himself.

Top lobbyists and White House-connected operatives are getting inundated with requests, sources said. One of them told us they're sick of being asked about the fight.

Republicans began flooding the White House with inquiries about VIP tickets almost immediately after the event was announced last summer.

One senator asked to attend with their family.

(Only one? Whoops -- this seems like a botched talking point.)

A GOP fundraiser close to the White House received dozens of direct messages on social media asking how they could get in.

Trump himself has been fielding ticket requests, a person familiar with the event prep said.

Is the "person familiar with the event prep" named John Barron?

Trump wants us to assure us that his 2024 voters, young men in particular, aren't rushing to the exits -- or maybe his aides feel the need to assure him. But he can sell the war (and the self-soothing sausagefest on his birthday) as hard as he wants. The latecomers in his coalition aren't buying.

THE SAVE ACT ISN'T JIM CROW -- IT'S MORE DELUSIONAL

In a column about the SAVE Act -- Donald Trump's top domestic priority -- Jamelle Bouie writes:

For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.

The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the true people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.

This isn't exactly right. The people who put Jim Crow voting laws in place knew that the Blacks they were disenfranchising were real people born in America who would be allowed to vote if the federal government were able and willing to force the issue. It's my belief that Donald Trump -- influenced by a couple of decades' worth of Republican propaganda -- believes that there simply aren't enough legitimate Democratic voters in America to make the Democratic Party a competitive party. When he says of Democrats, as he did in a speech earlier this month, "They're doing everything possible because they know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years and maybe longer," I think he legitimately believes that the large number of voters purged from the rolls by the SAVE Act will (a) be overwhelmingly Democratic and (b) be on the rolls fraudulently.

Trump believes this -- believes that all these voters are non-citizen immigrants or dead people or nonexistent people or people otherwise ineligible to vote, possibly because they live on dementia wards or in mental institutions and votes are cast for Democrats in their names -- because he's a Fox News grandpa who's been told over and over again that Democrats cheat in elections on a industrial scale. Millions of other Fox News grandpas and grandmas also believe this.

Here's a video from 2010.



It was produced by an organization called True the Vote, which I've written about many times. After the 2020 election, True the Vote was behind the Dinesh D'Souza "documentary" 2000 Mules, which is so rife with disinformation that even D'Souza himself has had to apologize for its dishonesty. Here's the first claim in the 2010 video, from the late right-wing propagandist David Horowitz:

The voting system is under attack now. Movements that are focused on voter fraud and the integrity of elections are crucial at this point. This is really -- I mean, this is a war! A Democratic Party consultant once told me that Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win any election.

The next speaker says:

There are people who are deceased who have shown up as voting. I've actually gone out and taken pictures of the tombstones.

The third speaker -- Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of True the Vote -- says:

One lady asked the presiding judge, she looked at him and she goes, "I forget who I'm supposed to vote for," and so he went over there and he actually turned the dial. She pressed Enter. He turned the dial. She pressed Enter.

Trump thinks this is routine. Your Fox-watching relatives think so too. They believe all this happens and they believe that millions of immigrants cross the border and are immediately signed up to vote (always Democratic) and they believe that Democrats slip fake ballots in among the real ones during vote counting and they believe Democrats tamper with voting machines so Republican votes flip to Democratic and...

Jim Crow vote suppressors knew that there were real Americans who would vote against them if they were allowed to. Millions of Republicans seem to believe that there are no legitimate Democratic votes, or very, very few.

They believe this even though they can never produce evidence of this fraud. They believe it the same way they believe that every anti-Trump protestor is a paid agent of the Soros family.

So Trump and his supporters don't exactly believe, as Bouie writes, that "the people of the United States are ... a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump," excluding Trump critics -- they believe there simply aren't very many sincere Trump critics, or very many Democrats at all, citizens who oppose Trump and his party sincerely and legitimately.

All this, of course, requires them to ignore large chunks of objective reality. But the propaganda they consume has taught them that what everyone outside their bubble portrays as reality must be a lie because people outside their bubble do nothing but lie. Everything they don't want to believe is "fake news." And everything they want to believe is the gospel truth.

I think Trump sincerely believes all this. I'm sure his most fervent fans do. They think the SAVE Act won't disenfranchise a single legitimate voter. It will only disenfranchise Democrats, who are illegitimate voters by definition.

ARE WE SEEING THE BEGINNINGS OF A "PURITY RIGHT"?

It's hard to say we're seeing a Republican crack-up when (per Quinnipiac) 85% of Republicans support the war in Iran, but some fissures are starting to appear:

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, citing his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran and saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war.

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media, making claims President Donald Trump has denied.

Kent, a former political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed to his post last July on a 52-44 vote.

Here's a bit more on those connections to right-wing extremists:

Iran war was a bad idea from start. But Joe Kent is not the right messenger on this. See his alleged associations with Nick Fuentes and live streamer who said Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand” @splcenter.org @westernstatescenter.org 2025 letter:

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— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 10:25 AM

Some of the war-related feuding on the right is laughable. Here's an exchange between Megyn Kelly (against the war) and Mark Levin (pro-war):

Busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly. She wakes up and has “micrope*is” on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot, and posts like a harlot, it’s … well, you know the rest.

Shalom! https://t.co/3jRmQS0zKp

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) March 15, 2026

President Trump and his Fox News Mini-Me, Sean Hannity, are siding with Levin, but Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon are criticizing the war.

So far, the GOP Establishment is holding the line, defending the war and declaring itself shocked, shocked at the increasing groyperization of GOP youth. We can read this as the work of the Republican Party in Ron DeSantis's Florida:

The University of Florida’s College Republicans chapter was disbanded after a finding that some of its members had violated a statewide organization’s rules, including making an antisemitic gesture.

A photo reportedly depicting two students giving a Nazi salute had been shared on social media.

The university said over the weekend that the Florida Federation of College Republicans had disbanded the chapter and asked school officials to deactivate it as a registered student organization while it seeks new leadership for the group.

This isn't good guys vs. bad guys -- it's bad guys vs. worse guys. As we've learned from recent stories about young-Republican chat groups in Florida and New York, the new GOP bigots openly describe Jews as categorically evil. The GOP Establishment talks about quite a few groups that way -- Muslims, trans people, non-Republican Blacks -- but not Jews. It's a rift.

I think the Establishment will retain control of the party for a while. Younger Baby Boomers and GenXers in the party will still hold sway for a few more election cycles. But I think the GOP might be on the verge of developing its own version of the "purity left" -- the young progressives who invariably find a reason not to vote Democratic (Gaza in 2024, forever wars in 2016, etc.).

Young right-wingers really might stay home in future elections if Republicans seem too fond of war, and if they seem too fond of Israel (a reasonable objection) or Jews (a not-reasonable objection). Will these voters abstain, or vote third party, or even vote Democratic, if a strong supporter of Israel -- or even a candidate who seems too comfortable with Jews -- wins the 2028 Republican nomination? They might. We might have young people at both ends of the political spectrum demanding that a major-party candidate earn their vote even though these voters claim to hate everything the other party stands for. That wouldn't be a complete party crack-up, but it could still be very damaging to the GOP. The difference is that in the GOP, hate would be the principal reason.