Wait - what ?

Notes and Messages

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A Dying Poet’s Farewell to the World

In his final days, Franz Wright tapped into a rich vein of material, recording dark, beautiful, and self-deprecating poems on tape and in sc

A Dying Poet’s Farewell to the World

In his final days, Franz Wright tapped into a rich vein of material, recording dark, beautiful, and self-deprecating poems on tape and in scribbles all over his apartment.

By Dan Chiasson

July 13, 2026

“Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments” collects work written just before Wright’s death, in 2015.Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Source photograph by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Writing poetry made the late Franz Wright miserable, but it was an improvement on just about everything else in his life. His mentor in this essentially comic predicament was his estranged father, the poet James Wright. When Franz was fifteen, he sent his dad a seven-line poem. The elder Wright’s response soon arrived from New York City, addressed jauntily from one “good craftsman” to another: “Franz, I am non-plussed,” the younger Wright recalled, in a poem. “I’ll be damned. You can write. What can I say? Welcome to Hell.”

It was the only home they shared, and Wright took advantage of his father’s hospitality. In fourteen volumes of poems, including “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, Franz Wright made Hell habitable, almost cheerful. “Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments” (Knopf), assembled by the poet’s widow, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, after his death, in 2015, collects work from the days when Wright was maintaining what John Keats called a “posthumous existence”; dying from lung cancer, he dictated some of these tender, hardboiled, and wisecracking poems into a tape recorder, too weak to write, or left them as voice-mail messages for friends in an “odd-sounding croak that was once a good voice.” Photos taken at Wright’s apartment after his death show lines of verse written on the walls, on the appliances, on coffee filters, and, the most Boston thing evah, carved with a ballpoint into a Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup. It looks like a crime scene, if writing poetry were a crime. “I feel like Philip Marlowe sometimes,” Wright wrote, lost in a “Los Angeles of words.”

As his voracious sentience began to cleave away from his suffering frame, this “facsimile of the person” became more and more a poet of the estranged body: “I am traveling away from my body in widening rings,” he writes, and yet, “If I think I have problems, / I look for the mirror.” Any errand outdoors makes him a kind of zombie Frank O’Hara, clomping down the quiet chain-link and brick-faced blocks near his home in Waltham, Massachusetts. Even a trip six blocks to the post office is an “exceptional event, long planned.” Wright’s spectacular disarray—you worried about him, just running into him on the street—was always first an occasion for self-ridicule: spotting his own reflection on a bus one afternoon, “I looked like a suicide / returning an overdue book to the library.” On the edge of death, though, the scenario becomes nearly slapstick; strangers who come across Wright’s body on the sidewalk move “around him, the way you would / dog shit.”

Wright’s poems are usually at least a little funny, and often work like extended punch lines; the way to read them is to try to guess the elided sick joke. What happens to the body of a lifelong smoker when he dies? In “Involuntary Detox: Smoking Porch,” it keeps smoking, of course, but not in any old crematorium:

Time for one more? What are you waiting for? Then come in. The nicatorium’s all yours.

Nicatorium! Wright went through many periods of detox, and was institutionalized several times; here he is welcomed by a stock character, the catatonic roommate who promises he hasn’t “said a word / all day, and don’t intend to / now.” Or maybe that’s a bored crematory worker, just punching the clock—or is it God, whose weird, voyeuristic silence troubled Wright into composing some of his most powerful poems? In any case, the smoker gets his wish, and his comeuppance: “Consider yourself completely alone.” That’s a poet’s fantasy, and a child’s darkest fear.

In these poems, anticipation is inextricable from dread. Emily Dickinson received “Heavenly Hurt” from the winter “Slant of light” entering her bedroom. As a boy, Wright kept his eye on the door, hoping that the father he idolized would someday return; to maintain this vigil into adulthood is to open oneself up to grace but also to injury. Waking in the night, Wright wonders if there is “someone else / who wakes disturbed, alone; / too bad we can’t talk / on our tiny phone.” In another insomnia poem, “Wait,” Wright keeps watch for the “late light,” which is “always / leaving” even “as it arrives.” For a child, this “steplight” could bring comfort, or it could bring a drunken thrashing. Wright wrote that his father beat him with a belt; his stepfather, he went on, “took over / somewhat more expertly.” If the soul survives, these poems suggest, it’s only by being battered out of the body.

“Axe in Blossom” borrows its title from a line in “I Hear,” by the German Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, who drowned in the Seine in 1970. Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses. In an homage, “Axe in Blossom: To Paul Celan,” the dead are called back to life by the “mere scent of their wives baking bread.” It takes a little more, in fact, than the “mere scent”: it takes an elegiac poetry of sensory nearness that mixes such things as warm bread and burning bodies. Wright is something like a laureate of the putrid, the stale, the acrid, and the moldy, but also of unbidden, stunning adjacent beauty: the “still-daytime / three-quarters moon, / the first snowflakes, swirling,” even as the new day itself is unthinkable.

Celan’s influence is tricky to absorb for any poet who did not suffer in a labor camp or witness his parents taken away to be murdered by the S.S. It is impossible to isolate Celan’s aesthetic innovations from his trauma and its historical meanings; Wright preëmpts that bind by presenting his own suffering as sort of lame and clumsy. It keeps him, in these last poems, from putting his finger on the tragedy scale: there are “so many things worse than death,” he writes, and killing, even killing a fly, is one of them. He quotes the haiku master Issa:

Oh why would you swat them, the poor things, forever wringing their skinny hands

Wright’s body is dog shit, after all—don’t kill his companions! “More than ever I am haunted by the lives of the small, brief, powerless, filthy, and poor,” he writes. But “filthy” suggests something less than a Buddhist’s commitment to the flies’ well-being. In other poems, Wright has some fun at the expense of a cricket (“my friend describing you over the phone, chronicling your brief life and fairly gruesome end, both of us guiltily chuckling”) and a moth (“once it observes you have noticed it or given any indication its presence is a nuisance, you will very soon find yourself the perpetual loser in a chronic contest of wills”). We don’t read Wright for the purity of his moral life but for the erratic comedy of his good intentions yielding to blurted reversals and denunciations.

All the unresolved, zigzagging impulses give even Wright’s finished work here some of the raggedness of drafts. “Axe in Blossom” is in every sense an open book, practically an open studio. We see its striking title gestate through multiple phases—in a translation, an original poem, and a collage poem made from lines by Celan, Czesław Miłosz, and Rainer Brambach. There are “Three Homages,” two poems called “The Writing” (the second, marked “2,” is presented first), one poem called “The Lamp, 2” that insinuates an absent predecessor, two called “The Kiss,” and so on; the poems reshuffle the same vocabulary, the same images, the same settings and themes. The volume begins with more or less “complete” work, passes through some abandoned drafts, then trails off into an appendix, “Burial Herbs,” which works like a commonplace book of maxims, partial poems, and poems nominally complete but “unfinishable,” in the sense that certain poems, perhaps the most ambitious ones, only approximate their maker’s vision.

Among the “unfinishables” is a poem that I consider a masterpiece, probably one of Wright’s very best. Dedicated to the German poet Karl Krolow, “At His Desk in the Past” was “transcribed from self-recorded drafts on audio,” in 2012. It’s “raining in a dead language” out the window, as Wright measures the duration of his life against various phenomena—some brief, like an infant’s fever, some ancient, like the stars. The poem, written in linked prose blocks, is too long to quote in full, and is quite intricate. But one passage gives a sense of its eerie logic. Wright describes the words of his poem “still traveling toward the world although he is not there although he is not here or anywhere”:

AND we’d do it again wouldn’t we—every last one of us choosing precisely what we had been given, a glimpse of a night sky—no—choosing precisely what we had been given not to be a sky of infinite diamonds unaware they live forever or exist at all but a pair of mortal eyes with the glory to see them, grieving their loss, a glimpse.

Wright welcomes those stars into his own “BRAIN or desert hive this named mind or single roaring.” The poem ends by conferring a childish name, a name that a kid might dream up, on these sad, undying presences, with their “honey-colored irises” and “muted wings” of light and motion: “BEE-iridescent.”

Rounding the bend, the book tours Wright’s points of origin: recollections of his first poems, his first trip to Europe, his first cigarette, the first signs of the addictions that so blighted the poet’s life. Wright hears now “the sound of my name posed, in my young mother’s voice before I finally slept.” The poet tucks into his deathbed, its “sheets / the color of old aspirin”:

I had often wondered where I would find it, it find me, or what it would look like. Don’t you?

But, hey, it’s not a deathbed until you die in it: “I could get some work done / here, I shrugged,” Wright decides. “I had done it before.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “One Last Thing.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Gordon Mortensen (American, born 1938) Double Iris, 2002

* * * *

“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“It is understandable why some find this cop-out appealing: the overall pattern is ominous. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States has been gutted in every sense: economically, psychologically, and under Trump, militarily, with even the secretary of defense position remaining unfilled for eight months. Post-9/11 America inaugurated an era of panic over fabricated catastrophes and false reassurances about real ones. The Trump era has only exacerbated those tendencies, leaving everyday Americans struggling to process horrific new revelations about which officials rarely provide clear answers. It can therefore be comforting to dismiss disturbing details rather than focus on the big picture. To reconcile with an attack on America as a continuum—instead of the result of an aberrant atrocity like 9/11—is to contend with the prospect of permanent dysfunction.”

― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

 a favorite--and devastating--poem by Sharon Olds.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Hockney

* * * *

“The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going?”

― Tom Stoppard, Voyage

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“At the very thought of ‘circus’…” Thank you, e.e. cummings, for your witness. Thank you, Corita Kent, for yours. Love is real, y’all. Stay safe. Damn everything but the circus.

[Thank you David Dark]

+

" At the very thought of "circus" a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and spring and childhood, this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the impregnable fortifications of our present."

e.e.c.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Memphis Muse

“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

–George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

IFAA Ensemble Dance

* * * *

“To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it’s fulfillment, it’s a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.” ― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Crépuscule d'hiver dans le souffle du ressac tanguent  les derniers oiseaux

* * * *

The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for. Red Clocks, Leni Zumas

[Alive On All Channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

soli :: @solisolsoli :: Ghost Above the Trees, 1928, by Franz Sedlacek

* * * *

“Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”

― Richard Powers, The Overstory

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Art: Indi Martin, "Medusa" (originally ink on bristol.)

* * * *

Her Circle Woven

Medusa  · Amanati

 “You don’t get to bypass your anger and your rage, and call yourself peaceful in your avoidance.

Your ability to feel anger or rage is not an accident.

On the contrary, it is a great gift.

Rage is an intelligent fire.

It is infused with its own magic, and born of love.

And we need this intelligent fire to unfreeze ourselves from the glaciers of time.

Rage is not innately ugly.

That which summons it, usually is.

The platitude Love is all there is does not also recognize that if this is so, then all things must be born of the One Love.

So how do they become so distorted and painful on their ways down from eternity to the nitty-gritty human experience?

Rage is not hate.

Hate emerges from rage not recognized, responsibility not taken, the projection of blame for one’s own suffering onto others who are not to blame.

Rage places responsibility where it belongs.

Rage recognizes what our part is in our suffering.

Rage also recognizes when we are carrying the responsibility that belongs with someone else.

Rage refuses to carry the inappropriate burden of the choices made by others.

Rage fights back for a change that creates balance and justice.

Rage is not the great punisher, but the equalizer and the liberator.

If you do not walk through the fires of your rage, or you do not admit that rage lives within you, you cannot find the dancing prayer that opens the gates of The Wildness.

You will have too many holes burned into your vessel. If you cannot hold it, you cannot experience it, and it will not free you, so you may not enter.

You will attempt to howl at the moon in all her glory, and your breath will escape from the hole in the back of your neck, or on the right side of your chest or out of your belly.

You will wail and remember that your rage cannot be nearly as terrible as is life as a piece of swiss cheese.

Without your intelligent fire, parts of you will remain cold and isolated, separate from the hearth and home at the core of your being.

They are there because you thought they were compromising your survival.

But you can see now, can't you, that without them survival is as good as it gets, and you want to thrive?

So find that rage, that intelligent fire, and call your children home.

Release them from the bindings of blame and shame that is not theirs.

Thank them.

Welcome them.

Feed them.

Light up the night sky.

Become whole, and let your rage be cleansed of guilt and shame, so it is given back its holy shine.

Rage can protect the innocent.

Defrost the frozen, traumatized parts of your experience.

Defend the sacred, the wild, and the natural.

Rage can inform peace, but it won't bring us all the way.

No, for that you need everything you are.

But without your rage, you won't be able to retrieve yourself and become whole enough to tind out.

Your journey is epic.

You are a miracle.

The Wildness is howling for your return.

Bring your rage with you."

~ Alison Nappi

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Here’s a page out of Crumb’s sketchbook (Volume 6, Taschen). He wrote this page about a year after he created Mystic Funnies #1 in which Mr. Natural advises Flakey to work on his fear of death– “Work on it...” he said to Flakey. Mr. Natural should have added, “Meanwhile, try to enjoy yourself.”

[azspot]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Trump’s “nothingburger” speech 24 hours later.

July 18, 2026

Trump’s “nothingburger” speech 24 hours later.

July 18, 2026

Robert B. Hubbell

Twenty-four hours after Trump’s much-anticipated speech alleging election fraud, the reactions are sharply divided.

Most outlets branded the speech a flop in terms of content, style, and effect. See, e.g., NYTimes, Trump’s Election Claims Land With a Whimper Among Republicans. Fox & Friends—the Fox infotainment coffee clatch—managed to talk about the news for three hours on Friday morning without mentioning Trump’s Thursday evening speech. Can you say that you are embarrassed by Trump without saying the word “embarrassed”

On the other hand, Rep. Jim Himes and a handful of Substack authors caused panic among readers of this newsletter, who emailed me saying they were distraught and alarmed, with one reader saying she “spent a sleepless night” because of the dire warning by politicians and commentators about Trump’s speech.

Because this polarized reaction will recur many times before the November midterms, it is worth asking which camp has it right and whether we are responding appropriately to Trump’s threats.

Spoiler alert: There is wisdom in both raising the alarm and recognizing that the emperor has no clothes, but in the first 24-hours after the speech, the doomsday industry and its acolytes went into overdrive, creating panic by selectively focusing on hypothetical actions by Trump without acknowledging that such actions are likely remote, unlawful scenarios that would be stopped by the courts—and the people. And the people. That is the part that the doomsday industry always omits, assuming that we are helpless victims with no agency over our democracy. More on that in a moment.

But first, it is hard to overstate how badly Trump’s speech failed. This was his big reveal of evidence of election interference, and it was worse than pathetic—the documents he released affirmatively proved that the 2020 election was free and fair, and that Joe Biden won. See NPR, Trump promised evidence of election fraud. Experts say there was none; and Fact Check.org, Fact Checking Trump’s Election Security Speech.

Per FactCheck.org,

There is no evidence that a foreign influence campaign changed votes that were cast in any U.S. election. While Trump’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that this happened, he didn’t explicitly claim that it did. . . . John Solomon, an adviser to the president and a conservative journalist, told reporters outside the White House after Trump’s speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.

Crucially, the sore-loser speech impressed no one in the Republican Party, which largely remained silent about the speech. See NYTimes article, above. The unceremonious thud with which the speech landed may indicate that Trump has passed the high-water mark of his unholy influence over the Republican Party, which has tired of his obsession with the 2020 election.

It is not just that Trump lost the plot and made himself look like an old man yelling at kids to “Stay off my lawn!” The substantive failure of the speech is the latest in the string of defeats Trump has suffered in his efforts to subvert the 2026 elections. On Friday, Trump lost his sixteenth consecutive case in which the administration is demanding that states turn over voter rolls. See Democracy Docket, Trump DOJ took a victory lap in Connecticut. Then it became their 16th straight voter roll loss.

Moreover, Trump’s executive order commanding the Post Office to refuse to deliver mail ballots from voters who do not appear on a federally approved voter list has been declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Massachusetts, whose injunction protects the 23 plaintiff states and D.C., and the Post Office confirmed in a letter to Senate Democrats this week that it is abiding by the court orders. See Democracy Docket, USPS says it’s not implementing Trump’s anti-mail voting order, for now.

Most importantly, Senate Republicans have repeatedly refused to pass the Save America Act, Trump’s signature anti-voting legislation. They have refused to do so because it would require the elimination of the filibuster in voting rights cases—an extinction-level event for a party that maintains minority rule through gerrymandering and the filibuster.

In short, Trump’s attacks on the 2026 elections are largely failing because legal advocacy groups and Democratic governors are consistently beating Trump in court. See The Atlantic, Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing.

All of this led to Trump being roasted for his pathetic speech. The speech has been labeled as his “I Have a Scheme” speech and the “Pettysburg Address.” I thought I had given the speech its due when I called it a “nothingburger” in the title of yesterday’s newsletter.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I awoke to reader emails frantically forwarding me articles from fellow Substack authors and a video of Rep. Jim Himes on the Lawrence O’Donnell show that had incited panic, sleeplessness, and a sense of dread—all based on Trump’s speech.

I am not going to tangle with my fellow Substack writers. I have my own woes with Substack that I will discuss next week, and I don’t need to complicate those challenges. If you choose to follow other writers who specialize in trying to frighten you, then expect to be frightened. That’s how they grow their audience. I don’t understand the attraction to doomsaying, but it apparently works; otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many people following that formula. But my comments below regarding Rep. Jim Himes apply equally to every article that focused selectively on Trump’s plot to steal the 2026 election but failed to mention that we (and the courts) have a say in the matter.

So, let’s talk about Jim Himes on Lawrence O’Donnell’s program. Himes is a member of the “Gang of Eight,” the select eight members of the House and Senate with special oversight of the intelligence community. Himes is usually a rational, reasoned, and calm person. But not last night. Instead, he spun a detailed scenario in which Thursday’s speech was preparation for dispatching armed troops to seize ballots in Democratic strongholds in November. No evidence, just sheer fear-based emoting.

In his delivery, Himes was panicked, breathless, and obsessed with what Trump might do to interfere in the election without giving any context, such as the likelihood that Trump would actually attempt the hypothetical actions, the likelihood that they would succeed, the role of the courts, the role of the people, and the downstream consequences of Trump seizing ballot boxes.

Here are two snippets from reader emails:

For a man not given to alarmist speeches, this was one of the most depressing, discouraging warnings that I could have ever heard. Voter suppression is one thing; taking over the ballot boxes to dispute the outcome after the Republicans lose in November seems much more dangerous and un-fightable. I am VERY, VERY worried.

From another reader:

I tuned in to Lawrence O’Donnell’s show and Jim Himes was on. As you may know he is part of the gang of 8 and quite knowledgeable. He was very worked up and predicted the feds will send in armed officials to seize ballot boxes around the midterms and that he is close to certain Trump’s goal last night was to set us up for that.

The problem with Himes’ presentation is (a) he seemed scared and rattled (not a good look for one of the senior congressional leaders overseeing the intelligence community), and (b) he acted as though there was nothing we could do to stop Trump.

When Lawrence O’Donnell asked Himes what Americans could do to fight back, Himes said they should visit WhiteHouse.gov and read the heavily redacted documents just posted by Trump.

What? “Go on a website to read documents” to prevent Trump from using the military to seize ballots? What the hell was Himes thinking? He wasn’t. That’s the point.

So, let’s work through this methodically and rationally.

Is it possible that Trump could order the military or DHS to seize ballots? Sure, anything is possible. But it’s not likely.

As David Graham writes in The Atlantic article linked above,

The danger posed by either of these options [troop deployment or seizing ballots] should not be dismissed, but there are reasons they were not Trump’s first choices: They are risky and less likely to succeed. Because election officials, experts, and nonprofit organizations have been paying attention to the threat for months, they are now much more prepared for anything the administration might attempt, as Washington Monthly’s Garrett Epps recently reported.

If Himes had only added to his grim scenario, “But state officials and voter protection groups are doing everything they can to prepare for any eventuality,” he would have done much less damage.

The problem with everyone who predicts that “Trump will declare an emergency so he can send in troops to seize ballots” is that they are guilty of sloppy reasoning, allowing them to make dire statements that evaporate upon close inspection.

The line of thought usually goes like this:

Assertion: Trump will declare an emergency. Response: Oh, yeah? Under what authority? Not the Constitution. Not any federal statute. Not under any executive order, which can only exercise statutory or constitutional powers previously granted to the president. So, don’t just say, “Trump will declare an emergency.” Name the statute or constitutional provision that gives him the authority to do so. There is none. So, it would have been awfully nice if Himes had started his presentation by qualifying that the “emergency” Himes was positing has no basis in law. But he just blew by that point.

Assertion: Trump will send troops to polling stations. Response: No, he won’t. Federal law prohibits anyone from doing so. See 18 USC 592: Troops at polls. It is a federal crime to order “troops or armed men” to any polling place, punishable by five years in prison and disqualification from public office. Himes did not bother to provide this relevant piece of context.

Assertion: Trump will seize ballots. Response: No, he won’t. He has no authority over elections, even if he suspects widespread fraud. Let me repeat: The president has no authority over elections. Again, that would have been a nice piece of context for Himes to include in his doomsday scenario.

Moreover, Himes and other doomsayers fail to look at the downstream consequences of “seizing ballots.”

First, ballots don’t just include members of the House of Representatives. If Trump were to seize ballots, he would seize ballots that included candidates for US Senate, governor, mayor, sheriff, school board, etc. While Himes was focused solely on Trump preventing Democrats from taking control of the House, seizing ballots would effectively spoil the entire election in the states where the ballots were seized. Long story short, the only remedy would be to re-run the entire election. That would be a morass of enormous proportions with hundreds of unforeseen consequences that make seizing ballots a monumentally stupid, counterproductive idea that makes it highly unlikely that Trump would attempt to do so.

Moreover, if ballots were seized, the courts would act immediately and order their return. Complications would follow, I know, but the courts would bend over backward to ensure that the election proceeded as scheduled, or was cured by a new election.

Finally, here is the pith of Himes’ sloppy thinking: Interfering in an election by using the military to seize ballots by force is a coup. It’s not just “seizing ballots.” It’s an armed military coup.

So, if Jim Himes wants to talk about the likelihood that the US military will participate in an armed coup to overthrow the midterms, let’s have that discussion and quit hiding behind sloppy words like “seizing ballots.” Call it an armed coup, and then discuss the likelihood that an armed coup will happen.

Lawrence O’Donnell should invite Jim Himes back on his show to allow a “do-over.” It may have been a bad night for Himes, and with a few moments of reflection, he might walk back his remarks.

The problem is that for every Jim Himes on a bad night, there are dozens of cable news hosts and guests who are advancing the same sloppy, hyperbolic, unrealistic thinking that ignores the courts and the people as the final bulwark of democracy.

The sheer weight of repetition and elusive logic that can’t be pinned down makes it exhausting to fight back. I know. Believe me, I know. But we must be strong, disciplined, and determined in responding to Trump’s fearmongering and the opportunistic amplification of Trump’s bluffs to increase clicks and grow an audience.

Concluding Thoughts.

My apologies to readers for whom this lengthy detour was unnecessary or annoying. I am certain I will receive emails that say, “Stop reacting to people who are afraid; focus on those of us who are on the front lines every day.” Point taken, but the truth is that tens of millions of Americans are understandably anxious. They show up and fight despite their fears, and we would be lost without them.

The reason I felt compelled to address the bifurcated response to Trump’s speech is that it will happen again in the run-up to the midterms. The doomsayers will keep churning their dire predictions, frightening and demotivating voters by convincing them that voting is pointless because Trump will override the will of the people in the midterms. He won’t—not if we have anything to say about it. And we do. We have a lot to say.

As David Graham writes in The Atlantic,

The greatest defense against subversion, as I wrote last fall, is for Americans to vote. A close election is easier to steal than a decisive one, and Trump’s political failures have produced polling that points in the direction of a strong vote against the Republican Party this fall. . . . Prime-time addresses that spew grievances and obvious falsehoods may drive voters even further away from the GOP. In an ironic twist, last night’s speech really might help protect the integrity of the 2026 election.

So long as we do not quit or surrender to anxiety, we are going to win. Trump’s weakness was on full display on Thursday evening because he knows we are winning and will win.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 17, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 18, 2026

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs that the reason they called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To ‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman” those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology like that” and so must do it to them first.

Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no communism,” is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.”

The embrace of authoritarianism in Unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights cost tax dollars and so, they said, redistributed wealth.

Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers sucking dry the country’s makers. Increasingly, they demonized Black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating.

And yet voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right, but even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked Social Security and cancer research, clean air and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the “Liberals” who supported regulations and the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash.

Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power, where they are destroying the modern American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and healthcare, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post–World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for seventy-five years.

But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.

Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China “carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.” He referred to “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” and called this an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” In fact, as Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of PolitiFact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available for purchase, and such purchases are common.

Trump also said documents showed that “members of the deep state” worked “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked “with US officials and other prominent persons” to “spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US elections.” Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being “part of a plot…to continue this [election] fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.” He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“The findings are stunning,” Trump said, and indeed if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits. But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., in two months have not changed.

Trump’s warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger.

He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security “to notify every state about noncitizens on their rolls and direct them to be deemed ineligible.” And he demanded Congress pass the SAVE America voter suppression act, saying “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected in any other way.”

“These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned,” he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the SAVE America act.

Today Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanded states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify noncitizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those rolls sixteen times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens’ information and often flags recently naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t comply with Trump’s demands.

Yesterday Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration’s opposition to “Radical Left terrorism.” A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the “transnational” nature of far-left terrorism, but Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call “antifa” and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump.

Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that left-wing political violence in the U.S. “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

Nonetheless, the White House said, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday’s War Room podcast that the idea of “communists” threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is “a predicate for immediate action.” That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare “a national security emergency executive order…that took all of SAVE America plus plus plus plus.” And then, we can be sure, the Republicans will win the 2026 elections and, as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years. They would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life.

The parallels between Unhumans and the administration’s current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller’s speech at the State Department. Bannon’s introduction to Unhumans begins with an epigram that reads: “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Miller told the State Department attendees: “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that?... You look at two photographs, and you see, you know, a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

In response to Trump’s address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement saying: “That was some bullsh*t.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON