Paulina O’Connor

E.D. of @NewJerseyOWA | Avid @Raiders & @LUFC supporter | Views are my own

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

@joeymdfox Congrats !!!!

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

This is what Trump's done to the people's house:

A third of it is rubble.

Another third is a cage match.

What a metaphor.

[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

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

@alexfromNJ @terrencemcd Cackling.

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

@CrosbyMaxx This is wild to me as a Leeds and Raiders fan.

[MKKM @michekyakeymii]

https://t.co/L46O3a4keq

[Brent Johnson @johnsb01]

Oh, yes, that is a video of new New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill rapping and dancing with Naughty By Nature on stage at her inaugural ball last night at the American Dream mega-mall …

https://t.co/uS3b6wGDla

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 excellent pick

[Daniel Han (@danieljhan.bksy.social) @danieljhan_]

Scoop: @MikieSherrill to tap former Coughlin aide for policy director in the front office.

https://t.co/5JWTDTMjv3

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

@danieljhan_ @MikieSherrill This is standard operating procedure. I don’t understand the anger and confusion. Happens every turnover.

[Grace Panetta @grace_panetta]

the most fun fact (to me) from this election night: Abigail Spanberger born in Red Bank, NJ, will be governor of Virginia and Mikie Sherrill, born in Alexandria, VA, will be governor of New Jersey

[Mikie Sherrill @MikieSherrill]

THANK YOU, NEW JERSEY!

I’m thrilled to officially be your Democratic nominee for governor and I am ready for the challenge. Let’s do this.

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

👂🏼

[Matt Friedman @MattFriedmanNJ]

The whale advocates who opposed windmills are going to protest this, right?

[Governor Phil Murphy @GovMurphy]

Wind energy has the potential to generate thousands of good-paying jobs, reduce harmful emissions, and secure a more sustainable future for all New Jerseyans.

We are committed to reversing this disruptive action and will take every step necessary to get these projects back on track.

[Paulina O’Connor @_POConnor]

@PalletMichael Meh

[Shlomo Schorr @OneJerseySchorr]

New Jersey residents will likely see their electric bill skyrocket by at least 17% beginning in June following a surge in the price the state's utility regulator pays for megawatt energy per day, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities said today.

[Empire State Building @EmpireStateBldg]

I’m sorry I have to do this

Shining in @Eagles colors in honor of their NFC Championship win

[FIFA World Cup 26™ New York New Jersey @FWC26NYNJ]

Pro Tip: Dream of summer 2026 to stay warm this week, NYNJ. 💭

🤳 @EdgeNYC

#WeAreNYNJ #WeAre26 #FIFAWorldCup

[Attentive Energy @ThisIsAttentive]

We applaud NY @GovKathyHochul & NJ @GovMurphy for prioritizing clean energy in their State of the State addresses! 🌿⚡Their continued leadership paves the way for energy independence & a growing clean energy sector. 🌍💼 Thank you for driving a sustainable future!

[Oceantic Network @oceanticnetwork]

It will take an all-of-the-above approach to meet skyrocketing energy demands. Offshore energy is key to securing the US's power reliability and energy security.

Meet the people bring this critical energy resource to life. 🇺🇸
https://t.co/hcA6XZhgIo

#OSWatWork