James Robenalt

Author of Ballots and Bullets and January 1973, Watergate, Roe v Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Our history books celebrate presidents, generals and billionaires. But how many Americans know about Eugene Debs?

A labor leader, anti-war activist and champion of the working class, Debs helped shape this country. It's time we learned about him.

[Today In History @URDailyHistory]

26 June 1963: U.S. #President John F. #Kennedy gives his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, reiterating support for West Germany after East #Germany erects the #Berlin Wall. #History #HistoryMatters #JFK #OTD #ColdWar #ad https://t.co/Y7DO550HfW

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

@jeffersonmorley Wow. That’s news

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

Check out this video, "robenalt fox youtube" https://t.co/LIzsqu2TGM

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

@DorisKGoodwin Good luck

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In this reality, the Passover of the Lord invites us to lift our gaze and open our hearts. The Lord is alive and remains with us. Through the cracks of resurrection that open up in the darkness, he entrusts our hearts to the hope that sustains us: the power of death is not the final destiny of our lives. We are all directed, once and for all, on the path to fulfilment, because in Christ we also have risen. #Easter

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

Right

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

18 U.S. Code § 592 makes it a crime punishable by 5 years in prison to deploy federal troops to polling places https://t.co/SRFdbqKgcg

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

This is stunning.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

A superb interview by John Dean explaining authoritarian leaders and followers. We explored much of this in our continuing legal education programs over the last decade. https://t.co/2UFNSz8PDp.

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

@ssuttell @JeremyNobile A model lawyer and citizen. Will be greatly missed.

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

President Nixon's Secret White House Tapes https://t.co/NSvW3W0Omz

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

The great Alexander Butterfield has passed. History changed when he revealed Nixon’s taping system. I was on a panel in 2012 with him at Chapman University School of Law. C-Span videotaped. He was a hero.

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

@MarkSZaidEsq I totally agree

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

@PrezWisdom Boo

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

Brilliant

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

This SNL skit about a MAGA mom slowly realizing she made a mistake supporting Trump—and her kids absolutely losing their shit over it—is so real to me. Especially the dad saying they should give her more grace because she has an old laptop that gets a different internet than you do.

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

These are Christmas greetings signed by JFK and Jackie to close friends, including Secret Service agents. These hang in Paul Landis home in Shaker Heights. “Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.“

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: Vatican sends Trump’s favorite Cardinal packing as Pope Leo cleans house.

In a move that sent shockwaves through both the Catholic Church and MAGA world, Pope Leo has officially shown Cardinal Timothy Dolan the door—replacing Donald Trump’s favorite cleric with a far quieter, far less political bishop from Illinois.

Yes, that Cardinal Dolan. The Fox News regular. The inauguration prayer guy. The culture-war crusader who once called slain MAGA commentator Charlie Kirk a “modern-day Saint Paul.” That Dolan is now out as head of New York’s powerful Catholic archdiocese, after Pope Leo accepted his resignation and tapped Bishop Ronald Hicks to take his place.

And the message from Rome couldn’t be clearer: the Trump-aligned, red-meat brand of American Catholic politics is officially out of favor.

Dolan, long seen as a reliable spiritual cheerleader for Trumpism, was so beloved by the former reality-TV president that Trump once floated Dolan as a potential pope—and even mused about nominating himself for the job. But Pope Leo, the first American pope in history, apparently had other ideas.

Enter Bishop Ronald Hicks: 58, low-profile, media-averse, and blessedly uninterested in cable-news culture wars. Hicks, who grew up near Pope Leo in Chicago’s south suburbs and shares a background in missionary work, represents a sharp pivot away from Dolan’s performative politics.

The shake-up comes as Pope Leo has increasingly clashed with Trump’s agenda, condemning his “inhuman” immigration policies and urging him to back away from reckless saber-rattling over Venezuela. In other words, the Vatican is done pretending Trumpism and Christian compassion are compatible.

Experts say the move is no accident. Dolan didn’t just retire—he was replaced.

“This is a sign of change,” said one church scholar, noting that Hicks is far less likely to justify or excuse Trump’s behavior. While not a liberal firebrand, Hicks has made clear he wants a church focused on unity, healing, and cooperation—concepts that don’t exactly poll well on Truth Social.

Dolan’s resignation was technically routine—bishops submit them at 75—but popes don’t have to accept them. Pope Leo did. Immediately.

Bishop Hicks will be installed as New York’s new archbishop on February 6, marking the end of an era where MAGA politics enjoyed a privileged seat in America’s largest pulpit.

In short, Trump lost another ally, the Vatican reclaimed the moral high ground, and the culture-war cardinal just got benched by the pope.

Please like and share to thank Pope Leo for the welcome change!

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Pope Leo is right: "How can we ensure that the development of artificial intelligence truly serves the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few?”

We must demand that the benefits of this technology work for all, not just the rich.

[James Robenalt @jimrobenalt]

@GarfieldNPS Hope you caught my interview on death by lightening

https://t.co/QKaDq83Txm