Democracy afoot in the neighborhood

"Action Jackson" visits the Waco Tribune-Herald newsroom on New Year's Day 2018

Ann and I very seldom post on social media about our private lives. However, almost all of our friends in my Central Texas neighborhood know me only in the company of our miniature, 23-pound white poodle Jackson, ever-friendly, always game for new outings and new encounters. To our overwhelming grief, Jackson crossed quietly into another, more merciful existence one day in May 2025 after bolstering our lives on a daily, often hourly basis since December 2013. That’s when Ann, to my surprise, brought Jackson into our home from Fuzzy Friends Rescue of Central Texas on a two-day trial basis.

He had been found wandering alone, apparently abandoned, in the nearby town of Robinson.

What was supposed to be a temporary stay at our home for a night or so became a lively, life-imbuing, life-affirming lifestyle for us and all who enjoyed our hospitality and company. When Ann – done with being “dogless” after more than a year – introduced me to Jackson upon my return from work one December day as opinion editor at the Waco Tribune-Herald, he sat on the sofa alongside her, already to my mind confident of being in charge of all that lay before him. In the newspaper ad pleading his adoption, he was dubbed “Ivan the Adorable.” In my home, he initially struck me as a bit presumptuous for a supposedly unwanted or stray dog. Yet, over time, he became my virtual shadow – fiercely independent-minded, yet dogging my heels, probably because I fed and walked him. The latter pursuit quickly became an absolute passion for him, to the degree that even near the end, years later, he continued to jump up madly but joyfully whenever I reached for his leash by the front door. We walked twice a day, strolls that often amounted to a mile and a half each, generally at his instigation when I might well have preferred shorter routes and a return to the comforts of home and hearth. He certainly aided my overall health in the bargain, given the hills that characterize our particular stretch of McLennan County, Texas. He paraded through the neighborhood as if on a grand inspection tour of the troops and grounds. Some folks called him "The Flag" because of his extraordinarily long, pronounced, fluffy white tail which never, ever flagged. And, in his perfectly adorable way, he soon prompted neighborhood conversation where it might not have occurred, especially in these polarized times.

Without my fully realizing it, Jackson became part of my identity and I became part of his. He not only kept me to a daily routine, he enlivened it. After our morning walks, during which over nearly eleven and a half years he helped me better know my neighborhood, my neighbors and myself, he ate breakfast, then retired to an old Lazy-Boy chair in my home office. If not slumbering (often a fitful slumber, given his constantly looking around and checking on my whereabouts at any given moment), he perched himself on one armrest, intently eyeing the length of our street from the front window of the office while I labored on newspaper columns and editorials or edited columns by fellow opinion page contributors or conducted and transcribed lengthy phone interviews with everyone from conservative commentator George Will to historically savvy political activist Beto O’Rourke to one of the Trump-loyal attorneys who filed a lawsuit to shelve the 2020 election — recordings of which were sometimes punctuated by Jackson's controlled, masculine, sobering warning of what he took to be possible threats and unwarranted intrusions upon his domain. Ironically, Jackson was ever accommodating to visitors Ann and I welcomed into our home, sometimes giving the distinct impression he might follow them out the door to other, more enriching opportunities.

At first sign of an intruder from that window — mailman, garbageman, neighbor mowing his lawn, neighborhood walker — Jackson barked till they abandoned ground, then looked over at me, seeking acknowledgement of his victory. I naturally always gave him this acknowledgement, usually in the form of verbal encouragement and strokes, even as I sought to calm his alarm by telling him that he was a "silly dog" for barking at, say, a neighborhood squirrel or the postal carrier making his daily rounds. Yet Jackson was never yappy, never ill-tempered the way some of his poodle breed are – except that we discovered through DNA tests, pursued on a lark by my wife the way adoring pet owners will, that Jackson was only half poodle, half plenty else, including hound dog. He was, I suppose you could say, an all-American “E pluribus unum” dog – "Out of many, one."

And there were our contemplative evening walks – earlier in the short days of autumn and winter, later in torrid Texas summers when I waited after sundown for streets and curbs to cool sufficiently for Jackson – obviously closer to the ground – to safely patrol the neighborhood, though even then I tried to keep him on the grass, which was cooler. (Jackson with the greatest of agility preferred walking on the curbs – I called him a “circus dog.”) He seemed impervious to extremes of weather and we braved all sorts, including briefer daily walks during the Big Freeze of February 2021 when ice encased neighborhood streets and the power in homes across Texas failed, resulting in scores of deaths. I took a spill on one of these walks – nothing bruised but my ego – but Jackson demonstrated his usual remarkable agility – so much easier, my wife observed amusedly, when one travels about on four legs rather than two.

A peacefully astronomical or astrological or celestial or astral quality – I’m not quite sure how to put it – graced our seasonal evening strolls, the stars gradually emerging during longer walks after sundown. I especially remember our walks in 2020 when Mars was reportedly at its closest to Earth – a mere 38,568,816 miles away, its third nearest approach in some 60,000 years. It dominated all else like some radiant, orienting orange jewel in the relative consistency of the night sky. Just for the record, Jackson was also with my wife and me during the April 2024 total solar eclipse which brought thousands of eclipse-watchers to Waco and Central Texas; from our courtyard where we watched, Jackson demonstrated no particular fear or confusion or concern when the moon abruptly crossed before the sun and briefly ushered day into darkness. It was just one of many daily miracles Jackson beheld.

And not to read too much into it, but Jackson loved smelling flowers, even those in which I could detect no scent whatsoever. Whatever caught his attention, he appeared riveted.

Ann welcomes Jackson to his forever home, 2013.

Notwithstanding his tender regard for flowers, puppies and kittens, Jackson ordinarily proved a headstrong, vigorous dog with an utterly infectious yet willful personality. “He who must be obeyed,” I sometimes sarcastically remarked, borrowing from H. Rider Haggard’s famous novel. Given my inability to come up with a fitting name, Ann named him after Jackson Teller, a leading character from "Sons of Anarchy," a favorite TV series of hers about an outlaw motorcycle gang, as well as her best friend’s maiden name. Ann imagined she would simply call him "Jax" as the character in "Sons of Anarchy" is called, but she never did. In daily life I called him "Champ," she called him "Buddy," particularly when kidding Jackson about his following me everywhere after I came to spend most of my days at home during the pandemic in spring 2020 and slid right on into retirement later. "I used to have a little white dog who looked just like you," Ann cooed. But he was always, always Jackson – a name that not only stuck but invited speculation by many on our reason for choosing such the name. My aunt, who during these politically polarized times voiced absolute devotion to Donald Trump (despite her belief in a woman’s right to choose and climate change), expressed hope Ann and I had not named him after civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. I’m still not sure where that came from. I finally fell into the habit of telling people that we named the dog after our seventh president because it was simpler to explain and Andrew Jackson – hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and enduring symbol of American democracy’s reach into the daily lives of the common man – was also on the $20 bill. That said, most fellow citizens I’ve encountered and casually tested on civics knowledge can’t cite who’s on the currency in our pockets and purses.

Jackson was the perfect one to prompt introduction and conversation with neighbors and strangers, whether in Central Texas, the pine-topped mountains of New Mexico where we summered (and where Jackson, during our out-and-about strolls, earned more spur-of-the-moment invitations into people’s cabins and homes than I certainly would’ve on my own) or the sprawling deserts of southern Arizona (but mornings only). Yet at home he reveled as he engaged in what pet therapists call “enrichment.” This involved, first and foremost, the absolute necessity of playing with his toys, something we continued throughout his life, right up till the day before he mysteriously sickened. His favorite passion at home: interacting with a set of progressively larger stuffed toy hedgehogs, so beloved by Jackson because, when thrown, they bounced up and about in the most unpredictable ways, challenging his agility and attack in not only “catching” them but wrestling them to the ground.  “Action Jackson” then insisted he be pursued through the house rather than simply giving up his catch, a baffling activity that kept me busier than I always liked. Ann meanwhile not only trained him in fundamental commands – “come,” “stay,” “no” – but little tricks such as “praying,” absurdly popular with visitors, religious or not, and his waiting, patient but alert, till a wall of paper cups had been meticulously erected, then knocking them down triumphantly upon command.

But all this was secondary to our walks and subsequent mornings in my office, especially upon retirement in November 2020, when he ate breakfast with me and provided company (often through healthy diversion from my work at the keyboard) as I labored on what I hoped were thoughtful essays and probing interviews as Tribune-Herald opinion editor emeritus. Unwilling to waste institutional memory built up over decades as a work-a-day journalist, I continued to regularly step into the political, societal and cultural fray, an arrangement welcomed by former colleagues grappling with the challenges of a dwindling newsroom in an age when so many Americans got what they satisfied themselves was news via talk radio, social media and Fox News. It became a retirement pursuit the way some people deliver Meals on Wheels to aging or incapacitated shut-ins. And Jackson my workmate. Through our walks, he kept me in touch with the here and now of the neighborhood, even as I thought through disturbing issues of the era on our twice-a-day walks. On some walks, only Jackson looked like he knew where we were going because my head was often in the clouds. He often led our strolls, and seldom the same route from day to day. And then, of course, there were those memorable encounters with the neighbors.

More than a quarter of my career as a Texas journalist was spent in not only sharing diligently researched opinions with others through the mainstay of the daily newspaper opinion page I oversaw but actively soliciting the opinions of others – and not just through their letters to the editor and submitted columns but by plunging headlong into the mass of humanity at parades, fairs and polling places, always seeking to better understand trends ensuing across our nation. In my retirement, Jackson helped ensure the civility of such solicitations amid conversations he definitely helped initiate and facilitate in the neighborhood, rife with support for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. I remember, for instance, a spirited, pre-retirement evening exchange on economic policy on one of my walks with Jackson. James Tipton, retired professor of finance who taught for three decades in Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, voiced strong views on finance in support of President Trump during his first term – a conversation in front of James’ home that ensued under the midsummer stars and softened when Tipton, pausing in our exchange, insisted on getting Jackson a bowl of cool water, given Jackson and I were a mile from home and the air was still warm. James’ compassion for my little dog touched me, given his hard-edged political views and his reputation as a straightshooter seldom without a vigorous, well-argued opinion; a week or so after this exchange, the 71-year-old Army veteran, economics professor, active Boy Scout troop leader and master-level chess player was dead, a loss to the community. Jackson and I never again passed the Tipton home without my thinking of James’ kindness that summer evening of 2019, notwithstanding political views that I saw as destructive. His widow Barbara continued such kindnesses whenever Jackson and I strolled by. Yet I now also reflect on Jackson’s own example, so patient and so tolerant to regularly suffer such pauses on our walks to debate issues of the day, a citizen-to-citizen digression that everyone from American author Washington Irving to French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville recognized and celebrated as distinctly American in the republic’s rambunctious early days. Sometimes, possibly realizing the futility of a given exchange, Jackson barked at me to continue our travels.

Certainly dogs have their roles to play in all this. Another neighbor, four houses from mine, is an unrepentant Trump supporter who lowered his U.S. flag in 2020 and raised a Trump campaign flag in its place, then did the same during the 2024 election. He complemented this show of patriotism (as he no doubt viewed it) by hanging, in one of many trees gracing his beautifully maintained yard, a Trump 2024 birdhouse. Conversations included one (also witnessed by Jackson) in which my neighbor implied but never quite came out and said that the alarm over COVID-19 was exaggerated to the point he and his wife continued to participate in monthly dinner club gatherings of a dozen or so. Yet I reflected not so much on his political preferences or even the loss of his wife – who when dating him 46 years earlier found him “full of himself” – but, rather, on how this quiet, agreeable widower for several years lovingly indulged his own little dog when the pooch became too old and too fat for daily walks. Wayne lifted his pudgy pooch into the car twice a day, lowered the front window and drove about the neighborhood, simulating as close as possible the daily walks they once enjoyed. Our paths would cross. His pooch would bark at Jackson from the car window (to which Jackson paid little notice); Wayne and I would wave to each other. Once, as I was picking up after Jackson at the edge of my neighbor’s yard, Wayne noticed and told me I needn’t do so when it came to his yard, that anything Jackson left behind was fine by him. I thanked him, of course, but told him that picking up after my dog struck me as a neighborly thing to do. (Many neighbors regularly posted on a neighborhood app their outrage at pet owners neglectful of such obligations.) Sadly, our contact lessened after the death of my neighbor’s dog.

For the record, my most enduring memory of COVID-19 – which Ann and I did take seriously as fellow Central Texans withered and died after contracting the highly contagious virus – involved our haphazard, hours-long sessions every six weeks of trying to trim and groom Jackson with a set of professional sheers and combs – all wielded, I fear, unprofessionally, amounting to an exhausting foray for us, even though Jackson endured all this humiliation stoically. Meanwhile, Jackson and I continued neighborly exchanges during the pandemic, its deadly threat significantly lessened in open-air encounters.

In short, even after my days as a newspaperman divining opinions of fellow citizens at parades, fairs and polling places formally ended in November 2020 – a thoughtfully timed retirement in what I mistakenly assumed would prove an end to the historically significant Age of Trump – walks with Jackson through our mostly white, mostly Republican Waco suburb ensured that I continued to confront and ponder viewpoints of neighbors who might or might not see matters as I did. Jackson, in all his adorableness, helped not only bring about such encounters but in his way encouraged neighborliness to prevail in all such exchanges. Nor were all encounters with those who counted themselves in the Make America Great Again movement. For instance, there was retired physician and political activist Phil Reeder, an engagingly kinetic sort whom I got to know through my daily walks with Jackson past his home, then came to appreciate and know better through absorbing evenings with like-minded individuals from different perspectives and different walks of life – attorneys, physicians, accountants, scholars, even a symphony orchestra conductor. All this ensued on Phil’s back patio, often over a glass of whiskey, often overlooking the sun setting on the South Bosque flowing into Lake Waco. These informal gatherings over time evolved into monthly meetings of the “Twelve Angry Men” (well, at least, as I came to call it, at my wife's droll suggestion), huddling in the home of one of our dozen to vigorously debate politics, history, philosophy and the spiraling, ever-shifting state of the public mind in the dizzying, confounding and alarming Age of Trump, often enlivened by my insights and testimonials gained in the company of Jackson. We put our minds to the same all-American dilemmas de Tocqueville did in touring America in the tumultuous Age of Jackson, trying to ascertain the American psyche that the French political thinker in his era so admired, even with his deep reservations regarding our stubborn societal racism and our astounding failure to elect leaders of the caliber of the Founding Fathers. In those failings, one wondered whether we had fundamentally changed so much since the early 1830s.

Insights into America gained in my neighborhood travels with Jackson are illuminating, thought-provoking: the Baylor University sociology professor and data-cruncher who reminded me that many local suburbs such as the one in which we lived and the one in which George W. Bush settled shortly before his presidential election originally developed because of white flight in Central Texas amidst resistance to court-ordered school segregation; the African-American retiree who had earlier worked at the Pentagon and eventually moved from our Woodway neighborhood to a city in the Deep South to be among more of her race, notwithstanding the fact she proved popular among Woodway neighbors because of her radiant, upbeat personality and ingratiating humor; the couple who planned upon retirement resettling in Italy, formerly ruled by everyone from Augustus and Caligula to Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi, because the MAGA mission in 21st America clearly required the snuffing out of so many individual rights; the white widow of a missionary who informed me presidential candidate Kamala Harris was a socialist – a conclusion reached because Harris’ father was a socialist, even though he only taught socialism at Stanford and never embraced it as a personal ideology; the Baylor instructor who, amidst President Trump’s talk of annexing Canada as our nation’s 51^st state, ran up a Canadian flag in protest outside his home; the insurance attorney, Army veteran and walking buddy who thrice voted for Trump and seldom raised the subject of politics but for one memorable occasion when he tersely informed a mutual friend of ours in the street that, whatever else, “when the Supreme Court tells you to do something, Mr. President, you do it” – his reaction to the Trump administration’s defiance of federal courts, including a direct order from the nation’s highest court; the amiable but gullible Trumper who hired some vagabonds knocking at his front door to trim his picturesque canopy of oaks – only to discover after they left (with more than a thousand dollars of his money) that they had cut many of the live limbs and branches and left the dead ones; the Vietnam veteran and neighbor who, after voicing outrage over the Trump administration’s imminent firing of tens of thousands of Department of Veterans Affairs employees, many of them veterans, insisted he was blameless in that he not only didn’t vote for Trump but didn’t vote at all; and, finally, a normally jubilant, big-hearted neighborhood woman who told Jackson and me of ordering two expensive straw purses on the day Trump sent the stock market reeling with announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs. When a clerk inquired why she was cancelling the order just two days later, she replied, “My husband and I lost $180,000 in the stock market because of Trump,” prompting the sales clerk to ask, cluelessly, like so many Americans in our times: “Why? What did Trump do?”

Jackson visits friends Gwen and Gary Kane in Tuscon, 2014

Rather than retiring with Ann at day's end, Jackson always stayed with me well into the wee hours of the morning. He was the last set of eyes I saw at night, as he curled up in a ball of warmth, confidence and contentment between Ann and me in bed, sometimes at 2 or 3; he was the first set of eyes I saw come morning, as I dressed to start the coffeemaker and straighten up the house. When he should have been sleeping, his eyes rigorously followed me as I tiptoed to leave the bedroom, even as he remained on the bed next to Ann. Soon from the living room, I would hear his little toenails clicking eagerly on the wooden floor of the bedroom, his quiet signal for me to let him out of the bedroom. Then it was a reassuring massage of his shoulders, neck, chest and back as well as a stroke of his famous tail; some play with his toys; and our first walk of the new day, followed by breakfast and guard duties just a few feet from me in the office where I continued to write about what so often seemed the decline and fall of a once-great nation – a period when so many Americans in a land of plenty amid hard-won blessings of liberty and economic opportunity were consumed with grievance, resentment and hatred for one another, some to the point of actually wishing for apocalyptic scenarios if only to vanquish their enemies, real and imagined. Jackson was good tonic amidst all this, particularly in bringing out the best in my neighbors and, I hope, in me. His influence on me and others constitutes, arguably, yet another Age of Jackson, however provincial.

Jackson understood the importance of variety in life. Often in the interim of my daily pursuits, he courted Ann. Sitting in a comfortable recliner opposite Ann in her "hideaway room," briefly distracting her from those aches and pains that come to us all should we live long enough, he nonetheless kept his eyes peeled beyond the doorway for new adventures elsewhere in the house – that is, me. Even so, he enjoyed sitting at Ann's feet or on the love seat in our sunroom while Ann practiced songs on one of three ukuleles for some upcoming Waco Ukulele Orchestra concert to which she had committed. Occasionally, Jackson added vocal accompaniment to Ann’s musicmaking – a most wonderful hound-like howl, perhaps a genetic holdover from his mixed ancestry. On other occasions he rolled about joyfully on his back, kicking his feet into the air, prompting Ann to pause our conversation – “Look, this is one of those moments” – and then motioning excitedly to this impulsive and fleeting burst of canine joie de vivre.

Late into the evening, he retired to the living room sofa; at times he draped his head over the armrest to eagerly await my return from the kitchen with, say, a glass of wine or cup of coffee to edit future newspaper columns in my recliner or read a book of history and political theory or philosophy or, finally, watch TV during which I joined him on the sofa, mindful that he really, really disliked feet, sometimes to the point that he growled lowly. Well, of course.

I didn't fully realize till Jackson was gone that the little guy was such an integral part of my daily life that I now find myself totally disoriented, let alone dispirited, by his abrupt departure. It is, I suppose, another lesson on the fragility of life of which the philosophers ponder and speak. My good friend Phil Reeder remarked knowingly upon learning of Jackson's sudden health troubles: "Bill, you have friends and you have friends – and then you have Jackson." Indeed. There is something about a faithful canine companion that allows one to confide the deepest of confidences, including our gnawing fears and wildest dreams. Longtime Texas congressman and Obama vice presidential prospect Chet Edwards – whose decency, compassion and keen insights into politics, history and the human condition marked our relationship as it evolved into friendship in our post-retirement years – marveled upon news of Jackson's death at the relationship between people and dogs – “there is just something magical about it that makes life worth living." He further noted: "I have always tried to remember that death can cause pain but it cannot stop love."

On April 18, when at age 13, “Action Jackson” went in for his yearly array of geriatric tests, he as usual excelled in everything — bloodwork, chemistry, weight, attitude, all of it. He displayed terrific health, probably owing to daily walks, a quality diet, twice-a-year veterinary exams and lots and lots of interaction and laughter and adventure and inclusion. For him, as for us, life was worth living, even amid the delusion and vindictiveness that now seemed to plague the land. Less than three weeks after demonstrating perfect health, Jackson was dead of a terrible autoimmune malady that five different veterinarians over several long days battled in concert without enduring success. No one knows what triggered the affliction; only wild guesses were offered, and these without any foundation — a mystery typical of this frustrating and often fatal condition in both people and their best friends. I learned a new word after long conversations with each of these veterinarians and during daily hospital visits with an increasingly listless, despondent Jackson – “idiopathic,” which my veterinarian explained after a multitude of tests and treatments is “a fancy word for ‘we just don’t know.’” Uncharacteristically, Jackson failed to rally, yet never once whimpered in my presence as his body succumbed to this infuriatingly unreasonable disease, its cause possibly buried in genetics rather than some outside cause. At the very end, as death loomed, Ann stroked Jackson’s neck and back, encouraging further slumber amid the discontent he clearly experienced. I lay next to him, face to face, our eyes meeting this last extended time, my breath on him and his on me, as he passed in and out of natural sleep in exhaustion before the merciful and quiet hastening of the very end. He passed with not even the slightest shudder or tremor. I continued to weep, caress and embrace him, grateful for the peace in his departure as I shook with grief and rage over the impending emptiness of my life without this innocent little dog.

Grief experienced strongly enough, especially given the mystery of sickness and death to a mind governed by reason, can summon up ghostly apparitions of a sort. I sheepishly raised this with Air Force veteran and motorcycle mechanic Gary Kane – to me, the definition of self-confident, independent-minded yet reflective manhood in a society where so many men are emotionally wounded or crippled to the point of living shallow stereotypes. I admitted that, crazy though it was, I kept hearing Jackson's little toenails tapping on the wooden floor and, on other occasions, the light tinkling of Jackson’s collar in distant corners of the house. Gary acknowledged the same after he lost his beloved border collie Jake, the victim of terrible seizures during his last years. "I’m positive you all did everything in your power to keep Jackson happy and healthy," he counseled. "Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason why things happen. Seems like the need to know the 'why' is overwhelming. There are still things that will trigger me to think Jake is still here. It took me several years not to jump out of bed if I heard anything in the night that sounded like Jake was having a seizure."

In the wake of Jackson's death, I find myself walking later in the morning and evening, thus avoiding chance encounters with well-meaning neighbors who know me only in Jackson's company. I am yet unwilling to go through the difficulty of explaining what on earth happened to Jackson and why I now walk alone. I feel shame, too, in not knowing what I might have done or not done that possibly caused Jackson's sickness (notwithstanding all the tests done and my introduction to the word "idiopathy"), shame that nothing I and the veterinarians could do, even when expense was no concern, could save him. I worry, too, that perhaps I let medical efforts to save him go on beyond all reason, prolonging his trials.  

My friend, retired corporate executive Mike Raymond, sent me a brief Jan. 3, 2024, essay from the Wall Street Journal by attorney Mike Kerrigan on the grief many have for beloved dogs upon their passing. An excerpt is instructive. It reflects on a friend's grief for a dog named Bear: "I like to think that this life isn't all there was for Bear. Years ago, Archbishop Fulton Sheen first perked up my ears, so to speak, on the spirituality of dogs. In his autobiography, ‘Treasure in Clay,’ Sheen wrote that during his holy hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, at times he felt 'like a dog at the master's door, ready in case he called me.’” Kerrigan’s essay continued:

British writer C.S. Lewis went a step further in “The Problem of Pain,” in which he made a plausible case for hounds in heaven. Lewis thought sufficient selfhood might exist in dogs and other domesticated animals that their immortality is subsumed within their master's heavenly destiny. For my money, though, G.K. Chesterton made the best case for dogs in heaven. In “Orthodoxy," Chesterton proposed that perhaps the one thing too great for God to have shown when he walked the earth was his mirth. What is more mirthful than the thought of a surprise party on heavenly move-in day where gathered guests include good ol' Fido? And who could keep such a joyful secret but someone with infinite patience?

Jackson on the homefront, 2017

Granted, some tough-talking, testosterone-driven cowboy stoic who rides herd over animals or some judgmental Christian nationalist who strictly limits humanity to humans (and then only certain humans) might see my grief over a dearly departed canine as a huge failure of manhood, a “woke” flaw in my psychological makeup. Yet Jackson’s vitality, optimism and jubilance around the home, in the neighborhood and on vacations; his insistence on active, fulfilling interaction, whether with toys or in our caresses or on walks or in my conversations with him; his resilience in the face of my occasional preoccupations and indifferences; his fidelity or at least preference for the company of my wife and me, to the degree he often dogged my heels – a consequence, I imagined, of his apparently being abandoned early in life; his energy and confidence in himself regarding all things and in all settings, so contagious and so invigorating during anxious daily life as shut-ins during the pandemic of 2020-21 and my own transformation from a busy lifestyle as a deadline-oriented newspaperman to retirement of the sort Cicero encouraged – one of deep reflection, simple joys and the gradual sorting out of what really mattered in life; the void Jackson filled for cherished family members who had moved on in life and death – all these stamp his passing as devastating, a testimonial of a brief life vibrantly lived and shared, a loss to be mourned, particularly given the suddenness and finality of death here on Earth amid endless intrigue and speculation about life and death for both man and dog.

My compliments go to all involved in Jackson's May 6, 2025, leave-taking, including Dr. Corey Zamzow and Dr. Jered Johnston of the South Bosque Veterinary Clinic, for an extraordinarily peaceful departure after diligent efforts to save him, as well as others who worked around the clock at Waco Animal Emergency Clinic, including Dr. Jade Haberman, Dr. Clay Wilson and Dr. Pat Griffin. Ann and I are now left with overwhelming grief, including wondering whether we savored Jackson as much as we possibly could. My friend – minister and world religions scholar Blake Burleson of Baylor University, with whom I serve on the local newspaper’s board of contributors – says the process of such grief is vital, relevant, even resurrectionary. "Grieving is a good thing; you loved Jackson," he advised me afterward. "Death is always a blow, a physical one at that. It hits us. Live into that now. It is remarkable how close these sentient beings are to us — truly man’s best friend." Another friend, Army veteran, music teacher and political activist Mark Hays, who got to know Jackson at our home during monthly gatherings of “Twelve Angry Men” to discuss politics and philosophy, even held out hope of a reunion, just as Chesterton did. “I often think how wrong it seems that our animal friends have such short lives,” he counseled. “I think that they are better than we who do so much evil and destroy so much on such a huge scale. I don't know, but I do believe that they have souls and that we may see them again on the other side. You gave Jackson a wonderful life full of love, companionship and fun. He will be waiting to greet you.”

At the risk of seeming utterly delusionary to cynics and naysayers, I hope for many, many more of those shared walks amid the stars, which somehow even on terra firma I believed would never really end. Just think of the others Jackson and I might soon encounter.

Described by one of his editors as “an equal-opportunity skeptic” and one of his readers as a "modern-day Don Quixote" (for better or worse), Bill Whitaker in November 2020 retired from Texas journalism after a career of nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist. He served as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor during his final dozen years in the profession.

'Political activist Beto O'Rourke on Trump 2.0: 'This one is on us'

 

    Beto O'Rourke (left), Chet Edwards talk during Waco's "We the People March for Democracy" rally.

Among a parade of prominent speakers including former Waco Congressman Chet Edwards and former state senator Wendy Davis, former Democratic Congressman and seemingly inexhaustible political activist Beto O’Rourke, 52, of El Paso headlined the McLennan County Democratic Party’s April 27 “We the People March for Democracy,” encouraging several hundred citizens gathered in Waco’s Indian Spring Park to demonstrate the sort of resolve that voting rights advocates demonstrated in pressing for the historic Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1965 after demonstrators championing the cause survived political violence on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. "The eyes of history, our kids and grandkids, the conscience, the creator to whom we must answer at the end of this life, all are watching us at this time of truth to see whether or not we will be found wanting,” O’Rourke exhorted his listeners. “And so, no pressure, Waco! But this one is on us. And think of it this way: How lucky are we to be alive at this time. The generations between LBJ and I did their part, they were great Americans too, but they did not have the chance that you and I have at this moment.” In an April 28 Q&A, O’Rourke expanded on themes that he and veteran Waco Tribune-Herald journalist Bill Whitaker explored during O’Rourke’s formidable challenge to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2018 reelection campaign.

Q   When we talked at the Waco Tribune-Herald in October 2018, you brought with you a book you were reading while campaigning – a biography of Julius Caesar. You and I and my newsroom colleagues discussed Julius Caesar briefly and, more specifically, the decline of the Roman republic that continued after his assassination. You said of the Roman republic at the time: "It showed its transition from a republican form of government to an imperial, essentially a dictatorship, under Augustus. And it wasn't him just crossing the Rubicon. It was the chipping away at norms and institutions over 100 years preceding Julius Caesar. And at some point it just gave altogether. So, yeah, when we're no longer a nation of laws, when we instead become a nation of men – and when some people, some men, are above the law because of the position of power they hold – we’re going to lose this." That was nearly two years into President Trump's first term. I would argue we've only moved closer to the Rubicon if we’re not already waist-deep in it, given the willingness of many fellow Americans to forfeit such fundamental protections as due process and rule of law. Am I just a glass-half-empty sort of guy?

Beto O’Rourke   I’m so impressed you brought that up and had that recollection from 2018, given how long ago it was. But I think all that holds true. The lesson taken from the Roman republic was that each of these attacks on representative government became a precedent that the next opportunist was able to exploit. I mean, before Julius Caesar, there’s [Roman general and politician] Sulla, there are others who defy the norms and standards of the republic in order to seize more power for themselves, and that becomes normalized and then others begin to look at ways to do that, including Julius Caesar and Augustus after him. With the president, he has now impounded congressionally authorized and appropriated funds. That might seem an abstract concern to some people, but the importance I see in it is that members of Congress – including the representative from Waco, the representative from El Paso, who serve on our behalf because we elected them – they voted how to spend our tax dollars. Those appropriations literally become the law of the land. And the president under the U.S. Constitution has an obligation and a duty to enact those laws – and instead, unconstitutionally, he’s not doing that. In addition, he’s destroying congressionally mandated agencies like USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development, a program established by President Kennedy to carry out congressional policies for administering civilian foreign aid and fostering development]. Whatever any of us think about USAID, the point is that people through their representatives in Congress chose to create this and only the people through their representatives in Congress can choose to dismantle it. And the president has bypassed that.

Now add disregard for another co-equal branch of government – the federal judiciary and those court decisions that have attempted to enjoin the president from illegally deporting people from this country who have not had the ability to defend themselves and are not allowed the due process that everyone – and I know you know this but others might not – that everyone in America is guaranteed under the Constitution. The Constitution does not specify citizenship or immigration status for due process. If you’re in the U.S., you’re protected by the Constitution. It’s a really amazing thing. And this defiance of the courts is very much in keeping with Sulla and Caesar and tyrants and would-be tyrants from times past, including Trump’s threats to pursue a third term, which is illegal [under the Twenty-second Amendment], is against the Constitution. It is not an idle threat, either, because we saw what Trump did at the end of his first term when he lawfully and legitimately lost an election – and it wasn’t Democrats who said that, it was the state legislatures of every state in the union where that election was contested, it was his own attorney general, it was his [handpicked director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security] who all said Donald Trump had lost. So he defied the law, the Constitution and chose instead to incite his supporters to try and overturn that election and, as we know now, he really pushed his vice president to illegally discount some votes. [Vice President Mike Pence ultimately refused to do so.]

And then, just to make sure we all get the message, President Trump on his first day back in power pardoned every single one of the rioters, including those filmed in broad daylight beating police officers so badly they became unconscious and causing so much trauma that several of those officers took their own lives in the days following January 6, 2021. So, Bill, this is not just a real and present threat to America, it’s a threat being fulfilled right now. And I think that’s why you saw so many people come out in Waco yesterday. People see this. Now, for all the smart folks, especially on the coasts, who stress the safeguards of democracy and the Constitution – those elements are admittedly an abstraction to most Americans. They just don’t get that. They only care about their pocketbooks and inflation. Yet the truth is everyday Americans right now are stepping up, whether at the “Hands Off” rally in Denton [on April 5] or the Waco rally yesterday – we had 1,300 people join us [for a town-hall rally] in Denton just Saturday. There’s an understanding that crosses partisan lines and geography and really any other distinction between us that we are at a make-or-break moment for the country. This is the Rubicon right now.

Q   You received much attention in 2018, 2019 and 2020 for your passion for books on history and philosophy. Is there anything in your famous library at your home in El Paso that would help Americans better understand what we witness and experience today from the perspective of U.S. or world history? Maybe some insight by one of the Adamses, John or John Quincy? Alexis de Tocqueville? Thomas Paine? Jefferson? Lincoln? FDR? Ronald Reagan? God forbid, Hannah Arendt?

O’Rourke   Oh, man. I now want to talk to you all day. I won’t do that to you, but that’s the best question in the world. It’s funny, my wife sent me a passage from a speech from President Reagan. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s something like, “You can go live in France but you can never become a Frenchman. You can go to Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you can never become a German or a Turk or Japanese. But anyone from anywhere on the planet can come to America and become an American.” And Reagan basically then goes on to say that the reason we lead the world is because, unique among the nations, we draw our people from everywhere, so we’re constantly renewing the strength and purpose of this nation. And he said something like, “We create the future of America.” I mention that because, in contrast to the very real precipice we are at right now in terms of rule of law and government of, by and for the people, there’s this really inspiring vision of America that Kennedy was able to articulate, Reagan was able to articulate. Some men are great leaders, whatever the party, and are able to remind us of our nation’s strengths. And we’re at a moment when what is precipitating this constitutional crisis, more than anything, is the illegal deportation not just of undocumented immigrants or even documented immigrants who have been denied due process but, we learned just over the weekend, a number of actual U.S. citizen children, including one with Stage 4 cancer, simply deported to other countries. [Legal filings indicate that the U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with treating physicians, despite ICE officials being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.]

Even beyond the legalities and constitutionality in all this, which I think is most important, I look at that speech by Reagan just in terms of who we really are as Americans. And as you and I have discussed in the past, if we’re tempted to labor under the illusion that our form of government will persist indefinitely – then go back to the Athenian empire 2,500 years ago, go back to the Roman republic. Look at Weimar Germany in the years 1932 and 1933, and you’ll see some very common themes. In the case of Germany, not even a hundred years ago, you have someone who is bombastic and at times buffoonish but is incredibly charismatic. There are different centers of power within the Weimar Republic that see Hitler as their useful idiot – the oligarchs of the time, the industrialists, those who wanted to rearm the German military, and it really took only a matter of days once he became chancellor to outlaw the communist party [and other opposition parties]. Whether we like communists or not – and I don’t like communists – but whether we like them or not, they were the bulwark that prevented Adolf Hitler from having an absolute majority in the chamber. He made them illegal [as a party to exist]. So when we hear people say, “We’re going to deport the homegrown ones next” [as President Trump remarked in asking President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador on April 14 to build more mega prisons for American-born criminals], you can basically think about targeting groups that are obstacles to Trump’s continued grab for power in this country. Your question just opens a Pandora’s box because there are so many examples out there from the negatives of the Weimar Republic to the positivism of Ronald Reagan. I just hope we can return to that positive imagery articulated by Reagan which obviously plays within the bounds of the Constitution, which I love. And, of course, Reagan didn’t try to go for a third term!

Q   In a lively podcast interview with former Republican strategist Tim Miller of the conservative media group The Bulwark the other day and then during your speech in Waco, you speculated how students in the year 2100 might well marvel upon learning of the American electorate's decision in 2024 to catapult Trump back into power, even after he said he would be a dictator on Day One. I’m old enough to remember when clear-headed American voters would have immediately disqualified from any and all consideration anyone who even hinted at becoming a dictator, even if he or she was running for local dogcatcher, let alone president. Yet such concerns bothered too few voters in 2024. Are we just ignorant of history or the Constitution or civics – or is it something else, something deeper, something more malevolent?

O’Rourke   You know, another great question. I think that’s a recurring temptation in American history. Look at the Confederacy, a government of our fellow Americans who chose to at least try to separate from the United States – and not only to protect the institution of slavery but to have that kind of power and dominion over other human beings, which is very reminiscent of fascism or authoritarianism or different forms of tyranny. And we know about the America First movement of the 1930s, including the massive Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden [organized by the German American Bund and held in 1937 with 20,000 attendees] with a giant portrait of General Washington flanked by swastikas serving as a backdrop. With the benefit of hindsight, we sometimes think of just a straight historical line, but America at times has really had a choice. You have folks like Eugene Debs, a socialist and a communist [an American imprisoned under the congressionally passed Sedition Act of 1918 who nonetheless ran for president from prison in 1920, complete with signs that read "For President: Convict No. 9653"]. You had this America First version of American fascism [led by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh] that was deeply appealing to our fellow Americans. And then, thank God, you had someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt who as president understood all the underlying motivations – maybe not that Americans really desire fascism or authoritarianism or state control as in the case of communism or socialism but just that they’re hurting, they’re hurting bad, they’re having to sell their homes, they’re losing their farms in Texas and Oklahoma and caravaning to California [as in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath”] and this government is just not working for them and they desperately want change. [FDR's New Deal programs between 1933 and 1938 sought to provide relief for Americans impoverished by the Great Depression while stabilizing the economy.] 

And, Bill, my theory is that’s what happened in 2024. This isn’t true for every Trump voter, but there were many Trump voters who may find much of what he stands for and much of what he’s done reprehensible, yet believed he represented the change they needed in their lives in some immediate sense. “I need a job.” “I need to make sure my small business is OK.” “I’m worried about a government not allowing me the freedoms I think I deserve or is overly protective or even onerous in response to the COVID pandemic.” I mean, people really wanted change and, I got to say, my party did not offer it. My party did not recognize it or articulate it or reflect it back or demonstrate it in the campaign. If nothing else, Trump, as you and I have been discussing, he represents change. I mean, the thing he does and says now that would have caused you to balk at electing him dogcatcher 10 or 20 years ago, the things he does and says are so different that, if you’re looking for change – well, I mean, that’s big-time change. And many people, unlike you or me, just don’t have the time or interest to delve deeper into this stuff. They see somebody who says they’re going to do something about inflation or they’re going to do something about immigration. And it’s like, “Well, let’s give this guy a shot.” I mean, these impulses are really a mix of things. It’s not a super-clear picture [of why Trump was reelected over Kamala Harris in 2024], but all those are factors.

Q   A couple of months ago I interviewed globetrotting journalist and de facto anthropologist Carl Hoffman about his rollicking 2020 book "Liar's Circus" in which he spent several months just going from Trump rally to Trump rally across the nation back in 2019 and 2020. Have you ever heard of the book?

O’Rourke   No, but I’m writing it down.

Q   Hoffman offered this observation about Make American Great Again followers in the interview he and I did in March 2025: "The reality is 75 million people did not vote for Trump but 77 million people in 2024 did. There are two kinds of people [in the Trump camp]. There are smart, affluent people who know better but just are greedy and want lower taxes. But tens of millions of other people really do live in a world which is an upside-down world. I can’t emphasize this enough. Seventy million people don’t read a newspaper, probably don’t watch a network news show – I mean, NBC, ABC, CBS, something you think of as more or less neutral or factual. For many people it’s either Fox News or they get all of their news, all of their information, from social media. They literally don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, they literally don’t know the details of, say, the indictment behind his keeping [classified] documents – and the crazy thing is that’s an open-and-shut case. They don’t understand these things. They just think it was a witch hunt to go after him." OK, that’s Hoffman's observation, drawn from the months he spent with Trump rallygoers. In my previous interviews with you, you have been unusually generous about your interactions with Trump supporters, particularly those in remote, decidedly rural stretches of Texas who, so far as I can tell, regularly and mysteriously vote against their own interests, judging from everything from the closure of rural hospitals across Texas, to punishing tariff wars that close off global markets for farmers’ beef and soybeans, to, finally, school vouchers which threaten rural schools and the farming communities that pivot on them. Given your discussions with voters of all stripes across Texas then and since – including your actually visiting all 254 Texas counties in the 2018 Senate campaign – can you offer a psychological profile of the typical MAGA follower who thinks Trump did nothing wrong, dismisses concerns about things like due process and constitutional checks and balances and separation of powers and believes that Trump’s election justifies his doing whatever the hell he pleases? I mean, after January 6, I simply can’t understand anyone ever again voting this guy back into power.

O’Rourke   I think the formulation of your question gets at it. I think Hoffman is correct as well. I’m actually kind of struck by the conversation you and I are having right now. The conversation we’re having would have been typical 20 or certainly 50 years ago. Now, I’m out there in the public realm, have been for the last seven years or so, and this is incredibly rare today. You know people [in daily journalism] want this quick, two-line nugget, “Let me just get the money quote from this guy, I’m just trying to get this thing done.” If there’s even a newspaper involved anymore – it’s just so rare as I travel the state as they consolidate or close or operate with these so-called “ghost” newspaper staffs. The joy and pleasure I get in talking with you is because I grew up in another world where I was reading about this kind of stuff and watching Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and their successors where we all as Americans were operating from the same set of facts. And, of course, we drew different conclusions based on all that, had different opinions, but no one could deny, if they were to be taken seriously, the reality of the matter. And that’s just not the case anymore. I’ve got college students, because I spend so much time on campuses registering students to vote, who will ask me – and this is like verbatim – “Beto, how do you know what the truth is?” It’s such a crazy question. What do you mean? “Well, I’ve heard there’s this Project 2025, but is that real?” And then I step back and realize that a young person, unlike me at that age, their folks probably don’t subscribe to the newspaper, they themselves certainly aren’t doing so, they’re definitely not watching TV (news) and their source of news is not going to be nytimes.com or even cnn.com, it’s what incidentally comes through their feed on Tiktok or Instagram.

You know, that whole idea that politics is downstream of culture? That has never been more true than today. The information that people gather is cultural. So I think we’ve got – not that you would – but others have to suspend judgment on folks who voted for Trump who just didn’t know all the facts as they were presented to them. Today’s culture, our society, does not place a premium on news, on facts, on truth. It places a premium on entertainment, on distraction, on making these social media platforms rich through algorithms that cause us to watch the videos we see. And if the video is engaging but untruthful, it really doesn’t matter to the platform, just so long as the person is engaging. So that young student who says, “Hey, Beto, how do you know what the truth is?” – I really feel for that person. That’s the canary in the American democracy coal mine right now. That person is indicating, “I don’t know what is actually happening, I don’t know how to make a choice.” And can we then be surprised when millions in this demographic, 18 to 29 year olds, don’t cast a ballot? I think that also speaks to the Trump voters whose rationale ranges from “I wanted lower prices” to “I thought what he did at that rally was really funny” to “Other politicians sound like robots but this guy sounds like my grandfather or my uncle or a real human being.” And they’re making this decision based on a very quick and, frankly, very shallow impression.

Q   Oh, it’s definitely not just the young folks. I know you have lots of interaction with them through campus voter registration drives. I was talking a couple of days ago with a 74-year-old Vietnam War veteran who is a neighbor of mine. Nice guy. He was in a wheelchair. He was telling me that he had received my subscription copy of The Atlantic magazine. And I said, “Well, you know, we got a new mailman and he’s been putting the wrong mail in the wrong mail boxes a lot and I’m having to take other people’s mail to them after it winds up in my mailbox.” And then I said, “Maybe the postal service is going through some changes or personnel cutbacks.” [In fact, the USPS is in the thick of cutbacks, including a plan to cut 10,000 positions.] And my neighbor made a reference to the big veterans hospital we have in Waco – as you well know from your days in Congress focusing heavily on veterans issues – and he complained the Trump administration was making all these cutbacks in Veterans Administration programs and personnel. He was upset about that. And I said, kind of nonchalantly, “Well, this is what we all voted for.” And he stiffened up in his wheelchair in the middle of the street and said, “Not me! I didn’t vote!” He then went on to tell me he had only voted once in his life and that in any case he couldn’t vote now because of the wheelchair. And I said, kind of chuckling good-naturedly, “Well, so far as voting goes, John, you have no one to blame but yourself. You know, you could have voted by mail.” And he just stared at me, jaw on the ground, and said: “You’re kidding. Really?” This is what I find among more and more Americans. I mean, mail-in voting has been around in Texas quite a while now for anyone who is age 65 or over or is medically incapacitated. It's the law. This guy also told me that, out of principle, he hadn’t read a newspaper since 1972 because of some newspaper report back then that Agent Orange wasn’t really dangerous to Vietnam veterans. And I said, “Well, John, those reporters didn’t just sit around in a newsroom and decide one day, ‘Hey, let’s invent a story about Agent Orange being harmless.’ Rather, some presidential administration official said it, the newspapers simply reported it, and only years later after further research did we all learn otherwise." You know, maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged him to vote! And, by the way, when I finally got my copy of The Atlantic, there were no dog-eared pages! No one had read the magazine in that household!

O’Rourke   [Laughter] Absolutely. It’s not just young people. But I think your example with your neighbor does make the same point in that he’s disconnected from shared realities, shared truths, shared facts. Maybe he doesn’t connect the dots between 83,000 proposed job cuts at the VA, many of them veterans, and the quality of care he possibly couldn’t get, and his ability to make a change in who was making those decisions. I obviously don’t know him, but I think it’s part of the same challenge, I really do.

Q   Did the January 6 insurrection or riot or protest or however you want to label it surprise you, given all the time you’ve spent across Texas interacting with people I suspect would count as MAGA?

O’Rourke   Unfortunately, it does not surprise me. It also did not surprise me that – and correct me if I’m wrong, because I suspect you know – but I think Texas supplied more insurrectionists than any other state.

Q   I believe Texas was in the top three states with Florida and Pennsylvania.

O’Rourke   Yeah, and I know from going to different events [about the threat of violence]. I was at an event in Junction, Texas, two years ago and there were probably 60 or 70 people who came to hear me in the Junction Library Annex and probably a hundred who were outside – and not just outside to protest but outside to protest while carrying AR-15s and AK-47s and all sorts of guns. And, on one hand, there’s nothing wrong with that because it’s your right under the First and Second amendments – free speech and to have this firearm and, in Texas, to carry it openly. But the two priorities, when combined, send the message: “I’m here to intimidate you. And I’m here even though you have come peacefully, non-violently, while pursuing a position in our democracy by trying to win people over through rhetoric, answering questions and showing respect.” And there’s this implied threat that “we have our guns here and if we don’t like the way things are going, there’s going to be some kind of a consequence.” And certainly we saw that play out on January 6. And certainly we saw that play out here in El Paso when another Texan with an AK-47 killed 23 people in 2019. [Patrick Crusius, 26, who characterized himself as a white nationalist in his political manifesto, this month pleaded guilty to capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in his deadly 2019 hunt for Hispanics in El Paso; he acknowledged being motivated to kill Hispanics because they were immigrating to the United States. Prosecutors said Crusius’ mission was to “dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States." He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.]

Political violence in this country should not come as a surprise, especially when you have a president who incites this – and not just in his first term, but you saw the tweet on Feb. 15 where he posted: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And what I found to be so ominous about that is it wasn’t just Trump reflecting his belief that the president is immune from any consequence of his actions, no matter how wrong, no matter how violent, but I really believe – and he’s done this several times – that this was a signal to his followers: “You are absolved ahead of time. You can do this with impunity.” And you remember during the 2020 presidential debate when he told the [far-right, neo-fascist militant organization] Proud Boys, “stand back and stand by,” and his remark as president in 2017 after the racial violence and death in Charlottesville when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” He certainly sends these signals and I don’t think it’s a matter of “if” we will see more political violence as a result of all this, I think it’s a matter of “when.” And so we go back to your first question about the Rubicon!

Q   Well, again, I don’t know whether we’re waist-deep in the Rubicon or stepping out on the far side. Everyone has his or her own understanding of why Democrats failed in 2024. I argue that Trump demonstrated a certain amount of resolve and gusto that seemed lacking in Biden and even his vice president, whom some argue was chained to an anemic-seeming president’s policies and confounded by the severely limited time schedule allotted her to campaign – just 107 days. Democrats have been faulted ever since for not showing much counterpoint to what the Trump administration has been doing. This may be why the traveling ticket of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, 83, of Vermont and firebrand Democratic Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, 35, of New York is drawing huge crowds throughout the Midwest, which is strongly Republican and heavily white. In your speech in Waco, you mentioned 1965 as another pivotal year with at least some parallels to 2025. The year 1965 gave us the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court has unfortunately pretty well dismantled by now. [Appointees of President Trump reportedly reassigned Department of Justice managers of the voting rights section to other branches and have directed all attorneys to dismiss active voting rights cases.] Yet in 1965 the White House was still inhabited by LBJ – very much an “FDR Democrat” – and Congress included Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who certainly had a strong grasp of American history and a respectful understanding the Constitution. I would argue there's no such parallel today, given that Republicans hold the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. What should Democrats be doing, given that they have been exiled into the wilderness till at least the year 2027?

O’Rourke   Yes, well, I have a more recent example, and I think you’re right about the imperfect analogy. In 2018 we relearned about a program President Trump was running in his first term called “Zero Tolerance,” colloquially known as “family separation,” whereby any migrant apprehended at the border with a young child would be immediately separated from that child and the immigrant immediately deported and the child placed ultimately in foster care here in America. [Reports indicate thousands of children, including infants, were separated from their parents.] In the succeeding administration there were attempts to unify these families. I don’t know the number but there are still a number of families who have not been reunited. When we as a country learned about that, there was an extraordinary level of protests, spontaneous and planned. In El Paso County, in a little town called Tornillo, the Trump administration had constructed a tent city and detention camp for these separated children. And so these kids who didn’t speak the language, strangers in a strange land, whose moms in most cases had been deported, we put out word with maybe two or three days to the world: Come to Tornillo, this is ground zero, this is where things are happening, let’s protest to make sure our fellow Americans know what’s going on. And with short notice we had more than a thousand people come out. And we know Tornillo is not an easy place to get to, but they came from Texas, they came from Massachusetts, we had one woman who came from Alaska, believe it or not, and it and other protests garnered a lot of attention from the people you and I were talking about earlier, people who are kind of buffered from the news, but this broke through. It broke on social media, it broke on traditional news such as newspapers. That was on the 18th of June and on the 20th of June, Trump or at least his administration announced that they were going to rescind the Zero Tolerance family separation policy.

Now, it’s not a direct comparison with the way it was with civil rights crusader John Lewis [marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama] in 1965, and it wasn’t just the Tornillo protest, though I think it was the largest, but it was protests like that across the country [that exerted pressure on the Trump administration to change tactics]. You and I love to talk history. Well, my favorite line – I guess I have a million of them from Lincoln – is “Public sentiment is everything.” He said it in 1858. [“Public sentiment is everything,” Lincoln told Stephen Douglas in their famous public debates. "Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”] He said, “Look, our country is deeply divided, we’re worried about who’s in the White House, who’s in control of Congress and the judiciary and the Supreme Court, but more powerful than all that is public sentiment. With it, everything is possible. Without it nothing can be done.” And so we saw in 2018, well before any kind of election, how public sentiment could force a president to change course, much the same way as public sentiment in 1965 helped LBJ on the course he had set but didn’t think he had the power [and political capital] to see through. I think your assessment is absolutely spot on, and Democrats and pro-Constitution, pro-rule-of-law, pro-democracy Americans have not risen up in the numbers we may have expected and that we saw following the 2016 election, but it’s starting to happen. More than a thousand people along the Brazos in Waco and 1,300 in Denton, just a day apart from each other, and the millions who came out in the “Hands Off” rallies – there’s definitely something happening right now and I do think – I do think – that it has the power to shape the decisions that Donald Trump makes.

Q    You may be right. President Trump's Department of Homeland Security issued an order three weeks ago that the legal status of thousands of college and university students here on U.S.-issued visas were to be terminated. This included three Baylor University students in Waco who found their legal status terminated and found themselves under orders to self-deport. The feds only reinstated all of these the other day in federal court because, after more than 100 lawsuits were filed over three weeks, these suits prompted judges to issue some 50 restraining orders. And these came in at least 23 states from federal judges appointed by several presidents, including Donald Trump. And so that policy at least temporarily has been rescinded.

O’Rourke   I think that’s a great example. Big and small, no presidency – even an imperial presidency or a tyrannical presidency – is immune from public sentiment. Lincoln understood it and Trump, regardless of what he says, he absolutely watches and follows the polls. We saw another example of it where the people weren’t necessarily speaking out but their money sure was when the bond market reacted adversely to the tariffs that he had set globally. He changed course. So for those who think this guy is bigger than all of us and is some sort of unstoppable force of nature, someone who has all this power – well, that was the message I was trying to get across on Sunday: This is not the case. Yes, it’s impressive and, yes, we have our work cut out for us, and there’s no way this one is going to be easy. The outcome is uncertain. We just don’t know. It could go either way at this point. But we absolutely have the power to do this. It’s more a matter of recognizing that and using it and not being deterred at every step because he is so good at flooding the zone, of raining down these bizarre orders and comments and distractions. We just have to stay focused as Americans have in all difficult periods of our history.

Q    What would you regard as the most outrageous act of the first hundred days of Trump 2.0? The pardoning of J6ers? The snatching up of people with tattoos or foreign-sounding names off city streets, often by masked law enforcement officers dressed in plain clothes? Defiance of federal courts, including an arguably impotent and outmaneuvered Supreme Court of the United States? Destruction of the global markets on which the retirement plans and business prospects of many Americans depend? Weaponizing government to go after personal enemies such as Christopher Krebs and various law firms? Or something else?     

O’Rourke   In the same way as 1776, during the crafting of the Declaration of Independence, they couldn’t isolate just one thing King George had done. But of all the things you’ve mentioned, the fact that on Day One, in one of his very first acts as president, he pardons his January 6 insurrectionists. The reason that stands out in a very crowded field is that not only did he pardon people who beat these police officers and clearly committed crimes and are shown on videotape doing that – bad enough in itself – but it sent a signal. And that’s what makes this third term threat of his something we should take very, very seriously. The signal is that if you commit violence in service of Donald Trump and that violence includes trying to stop the transition of power in this country, if that violence includes pursuing the political enemies of Donald Trump, if that violence includes possibly changing the very form of government under which we exist, then that is permissible and allowable and can done with impunity in Trump’s America. Now some may hear me say that and say, “Well, Beto, that’s just hysterical.” But I guarantee you, the perpetrators of January 6 and their fellow travelers read that message clear as day. And, really, shame on all of us if after January 6, 2021, and after the pardoning of everyone who was implicated in January 6, 2021, we don’t expect this to happen again. Again, I don’t think it’s a matter of “if” but a matter of “when.” The other question is whether we will be prepared to meet that challenge once it arises. I think most of us hope that challenge is met democratically, peacefully and non-violently at the ballot box in 2026. Before that, it is done through peaceful protest such as we saw in Waco. But we should labor under no illusions that this is the threat that looms largest for our democracy at this time. It is not an electoral threat, although we have to take that one seriously, but it is the threat of political violence. And it’s not just January 6, we have to connect the dots to August 2019 in El Paso and many other incidents or attempts at political violence connected to Donald Trump.

Rally-hopping journalist Carl Hoffman: MAGA grievance, delusion confound solutions in 21st century global economy

Author Carl Hoffman: "He's powerful. The first time I saw him, I thought, 'Wow, this guy is powerful, he just conveys a power.'"

Two years after Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 reelection bid with a March 25, 2023, rally at Waco Regional Airport, a constitutionally contemptuous Trump presidency is gutting everything from the Internal Revenue Service to the Department of Veterans Affairs; siding with Russian attackers over Ukrainian defenders; weaponizing the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s political enemies; and testing the tolerance of global markets and the federal judiciary. Anyone trying to understand the mindset of Americans supportive of all this should consult globetrotting American journalist Carl Hoffman’s 2020 book “Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.” It chronicles the former National Geographic contributing editor’s rollicking months attending Make America Great Again rallies nationwide, including an Oct. 17, 2019, rally at the American Airlines Center in Dallas that drew 20,000 Trump fans. The book’s final chapter bristles with arguably the most profound, insightful summation of the MAGA mindset under Trump’s influence. A brief excerpt:

"He acknowledged them. Acknowledged their pain, their confusion, their vertigo. He gave voice to them. They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else. When I listened to Trump fans talk about 'them' and 'they' – how 'they' wanted something for nothing nowadays – the subtext, the code, was lazy people of color and immigrants who wanted everything for free. Yet we were supposed to have sympathy for white men who weren't changing with the times. They wanted to work, didn’t want handouts, were hungry for the meritocracy, in their parlance. But that was bullshit. They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment. They pined for a time when billions of Indians and Chinese, Brazilians and Indonesians – the whole rest of the world – were living in abject poverty with scant education and Americans and Europeans were the only people who designed things and built them. But the world wasn’t like that anymore."

On occasion of the Waco rally's two-year anniversary, the Waco Tribune-Herald spoke with Hoffman – best-known for his extensive forays and research into tribal cultures of New Guinea and Borneo – about Trump’s steadfast supporters a day after Trump "paused" military aid to besieged Ukraine in its war with Russia (with the Kremlin praising the United States for forsaking its ally in exchange for a policy that "largely aligns with our vision"); sparked trade tensions by threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, causing all of the gains seen in the S&P 500 since Trump’s Nov. 5 election to vanish; vowed gutting federal funding for colleges and universities that allow "illegal protests," whatever those are; and oversaw continued cutting of tens of thousands of federal employees, threatening to paralyze constituent services such as Social Security. Below is a greatly expanded edition of exchanges conducted March 4 and March 19 and published March 22, 2025, in the Tribune-Herald.

Q   Of the avalanche of books about the political and cultural phenomenon of Donald Trump, “Liar’s Circus” has long struck me as the most engaging if most disturbing. It conjures musty motel rooms, long lines of Trump fans camped out to get into coliseums and ingratiating conversations with Trumpers that seem rational one moment, utterly insane the next. It's extraordinarily personal, given the intimacy you gained with those who regularly frequented Trump's far-flung rallies during his first presidency. The book was published Labor Day weekend 2020, two months before the general election. Have any further conclusions about Trump followers crystalized?

Carl Hoffman   Thank you for saying that. I’ll be honest with you: That’s my fifth book and the worst-selling one of all. It was a total flop. It got no attention and almost no one reviewed it and I sold like 6,000 copies. I appreciate your words more than you know.

Q   It’s extremely readable. You allow conversations with very interesting folks to unfold, each offering varying motives for his or her Trump obsession. It’s entertaining. I mean, there’s a gal from my hometown of Abilene – maybe you’ve seen her – who gets dressed up as Captain America in this skin-tight, red, white and blue outfit and drives in her sports car from Trump rally to Trump rally across America. She’s a Dyess Air Force veteran, an Iraq War veteran, a J6er, a lot of fun. She also believes former Vice President Pence should be executed for treason. It took several cops to drag her off inauguration scaffolding during the January 6 violence.

Hoffman   I worried that people meeting the characters in my book – Rick Frazier, Rick Snowden and Gale Roberts, for instance – would think I picked the most egregious, craziest nutcases rather than the norm. I don’t think that’s so. They were colorful in the way some people are, but their opinions and views, their conspiratorial views, their nonsensical views, their way of seeing the world as upside-down – at least I see as upside-down – were more prevalent than I thought. When I started this project, I thought I would have long, interesting political conversations with these people. A big Trump rally was 22,000 people, a small one is 10,000, and I thought the kooks would be a small percentage. In reality, out of 22,000 people, I think 21,900 believe most of the conspiracy theories one way or another. Characters such as Gale and Rick and Rick were actually pretty mainstream in their Trumpian thinking.

Q   Your book came out two months before the 2020 election.

Hoffman   That was one of the problems, the book coming out in the middle of the pandemic before a vaccine was available. No bookstores were open, I couldn’t do events, nobody was really flying at airports.

Q   With the passage of time, have any further conclusions about the psychological profile of Trump followers struck you?

Hoffman   No, everything those guys said, everything everyone said to me during my reporting, was right on then [in terms of MAGA thinking]. It’s as relevant today. It was true in 2019 and early 2020 when I met them and wrote down their words and it’s true now. I mean, there’s so many things to talk about, but what Trump has done is not because of Trump alone but because of the changing media landscape, which is really a changing technological landscape. The reality is 75 million people did not vote for Trump but 77 million people in 2024 did. There are two kinds of people [in the Trump camp]. There are smart, affluent people who know better but just are greedy and want lower taxes. But tens of millions of other people really do live in a world which is an upside-down world. I can’t emphasize this enough. Seventy million people don’t read a newspaper, probably don’t watch a network news show – I mean, NBC, ABC, CBS, something you think of as more or less neutral or factual. For many people it’s either Fox News or they get all of their news, all of their information, from social media. They literally don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, they literally don’t know the details of, say, the indictment behind his keeping [classified] documents – and the crazy thing is that’s an open-and-shut case. They don’t understand these things. They just think it was a witch hunt to go after him.

Trump in Dallas, 2019: "At stake in this fight is the survival of American democracy itself." 

Q   Yes, campaign officials handed out signs reading “Witch Hunt” for Trump supporters to wave at all the cameras during the 2023 Trump rally in Waco. You stress 77 million people voted Trump back into power. Surely not all of them are rich people who just don’t want to pay their taxes or people who live in this “upside-down world” such as Rick and Rick and Gale. What explains Trump’s appeal beyond these two groups?

Hoffman   It’s important to understand, again, that Rick and Rick and Gale, the characters populating “Liar’s Circus,” were not aberrations. I mean, they might be aberrations in the sense they were going to one Trump rally after another over months and were sort of groupies, but their opinions about Trump and the state of the world and their belief in this upside-down world is totally common. That’s one thing about media and the bubble in which people now live. These people genuinely believe that the [2020] election was rigged, that the charges filed against Trump were politically motivated, that the impeachments lacked merit and were based on Trump Derangement Syndrome. My book is four years old, almost five, but there’s a lot in it about changes in the world that upset people and left them feeling this sense of vertigo and disempowerment. Years later it’s clear these feelings still exist and it’s perhaps even deeper. We keep hearing people say how the economy was bad and people were overwhelmed by the price of eggs and inflation. Yet statistics showed that unemployment was crazy low under Biden, that the stock market was high, that there was this incredible stream of job creation – and that inflation was a direct result in part of the pandemic and worldwide and present in economies run by liberals as well as conservatives. These things clearly had an impact on these people. I can’t put my finger on it. I can’t really explain this narrative spun by Trumpians about the economy. In certain areas of the country – the Midwest, the Rust Belt – there are places that feel very depressed. I mean, they’re not like bustling, teeming Los Angeles or New York City or D.C. But the larger point is there’s a lot of people who support not just Trump in the first place but continue to support what Musk is doing in this complete gutting of the federal government and this antipathy toward democracy. And I don’t know what the reason for that is. I just don’t know.

Q   They really seem to want to “burn it all down.”

Hoffman   Yeah, and I don’t know where that comes from really. At the end of the day, will Trumpian tariffs reconstitute the kind of manufacturing this country used to have in the United States or is that never going to happen because times have changed, the economy has changed and we have all these other countries with educated workforces who are capable of designing and building anything while wages are still lower there. Why would someone build something in the United States when it takes millions of dollars and years to build factories? Will these things come back? I don’t think, no matter how big a tariff you put on [imported goods], we’re going to return to a place where America’s economy is built on old-time manufacturing. Even if it does, with the rise of AI and robotics, the number of people who are unskilled without college educations necessary to make all this happen will never exist. I just don’t believe it’s going to happen. I’m getting off track here, but if I had to put it simply, it seems there are great changes taking place economically and culturally and socially across the world that no person or policy is responsible for and that people are feeling those. The Trumpians have been able to exploit this.

Q   Bringing old-time manufacturing back to the United States strikes me as trying to put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. Does anyone really think they can pay Americans working in manufacturing plants what they pay them in, say, China?

Hoffman   You’re not going to be able to pay them that little. And you’re not going to be able to make it and sell it (competitively) if you have to pay them $30 an hour.

Q   I don’t imagine even Trumpers will stand for returning to manufacturing jobs with their wages cut just so they can bring manufacturing back to the United States. I mean, this is a case where a lot of people just aren’t thinking. There are things that could help this economy but we’re just not interested in those. We want to go back to the 1950s or apparently now the Gilded Age that Trump talks so glowingly about, but we’re taking bits and pieces out of our history and ignoring the broader context of those very different times.

Hoffman   Getting rid of environmental protections in favor of the internal combustion engine – that’s trying to rewrite history. At the end of the day, electrical cars are going to triumph because they’re better.

Q   Yet the other day President Trump talked about bringing back coal, a reversal of what even conservatives talked of a few years ago in encouraging more nuclear power. [In a March 17 social-media post, Trump wrote: "After years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants, I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL."] We here in Central Texas already went through all that. When a proposal arose among state officials more than two decades ago to ring our area with coal-fired power plants, a lot of rural folks who would’ve lived next door to these plants raised the roof and managed to derail these plans. I remember one longtime rancher, Robert Cervenka, saying he didn’t want a coal-fired power plant with all sorts of chemical-ridden exhaust ash falling into his stock tank!

Hoffman   You have a world in which the second largest economy in the world, maybe the largest at certain times – I’m talking about China – is making tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. It’s not just about having the trains but the technology to build those things and that network and to be able to export that technology and those trains. The same with solar panels and electric cars. There has been a slew of stories recently about how incredible Chinese electric cars are and they’re cheaper and better than the American cars. Trump can wish all he wants to dig more coal and return to the internal combustion automobile on the Great American Highway, but that’s from the 1980s and the world meanwhile is changing. And we’re going to lose out. The point is the U.S. is falling behind and will be behind the rest of the world and we’ll lose out on markets. This [Trump-led] abandonment of NATO, this abandonment of Europe, this so-called “America First” – all of those things are abandoning American hegemony in the economy and security and moral force. All of this is a complete retrenchment and it’s not happening in a vacuum. That’s the thing people don’t understand. You won’t make electric cars? Well, the Chinese will and they’ll sell them all over the world. There are millions of other people who are going to step into this [American] vacuum to lead in all of these things and it’s going to put America behind. It’s destroying this country.

Q   A few people in our area were involved in the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capitol. I’ve been through their court filings, prosecution and defense, plus those of many, many others. It’s clear the FBI wasn’t out there instigating violence. Nor were antifa activists. Most J6 defendants in sentencing memorandums acknowledge their presence in the attack, either explaining themselves as unwittingly caught up in all the excitement or excusing the crimes for which they were convicted by pleading some societal grievance such as PTSD or pandemic isolation or business failure. One from our area sentenced to several years in prison explained that he thought it was OK to enter the Capitol because of Trump's encouragement in his incendiary speech earlier in the day at the Ellipse. Yet political operatives at my front door trying to get me to vote Republican in 2024 insist J6 was an “inside job.”

Hoffman   It's cliché to say so, but it’s true: All the things Trumpers say of others are projections of themselves. Everything they accuse the left of doing are things the right is actually doing. January 6 is a good example. I have friends on Facebook, a large number of people who are not my political brethren. I don’t silence or block them because I’m interested in what they have to say. I practiced karate for almost 30 years and my teacher is like a father figure to me. He’s also the most right-wing, obnoxious, racist Trumpian. I never knew this about him until Trump came along, so I’m loathe to silence him. But here’s a guy who believes in Blue Lives Matter and sees BLM [Black Lives Matter] as rioters who should be thrown into prison and the key tossed away. Yet he posts every day about the “patriots” who went into the Capitol and how the [police officer] who is black, not white, killed Ashli Babbitt. I mean, here was a group of violent rioters who broke into U.S. property and assaulted the police. And the person who was shot by police because she was physically breaking through the last barrier between the rioters and the vice president of the United States – I mean, he’s got it all upside-down!

Q   The casual Trump voter I get. Some of my neighbors, for instance, don't particularly care for Trump, acknowledge they would have preferred someone less volatile as the Republican nominee. But they're also easily overwhelmed by the tedious complexities of such issues as tariffs and immigration and taxation, not to mention the flood of executive orders and social-media posts coming daily from the Trump White House and Trump co-president and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk and Trump himself. So they retreat into this non-thinking, knee-jerk default position of identity politics. They simply vote Republican and trust in Trump to bow to at least some Republican priorities, including not interfering with their 401(k) investments in the markets and not letting transgender people compete in sports.

Hoffman   I think you’re right. It’s also because the media system has changed. I’m 64, almost 65, and when I was growing up, people tuned to “Huntley & Brinkley” [which aired from 1956 to 1970 on NBC] or whatever each night. Every American watched the same newscast for a half-hour.

Q   We all had the same news. We discussed and debated the same facts.

Hoffman   Now these people, even the casual Trump voters, the people you’re talking about, don’t read the newspaper. I mean, maybe they read a local newspaper – I don’t know how much local newspapers say – but they don’t read, say, the Washington Post or the New York Times, they probably don’t even read the Wall Street Journal. They’re not engaging on an intellectual level with any of this. They’re removed from history. We’re getting further and further away from World War II and from fascism [which the United States belatedly fought]. What happened in World War II was a signature event of our lives. I was born after World War II, but it was still about Nazis and Mussolini. Twenty million Russians died and untold millions of other people. It was a generation about Anne Frank and the degradation of Nazism and racism and a world war in which Rosie the Riveter and the Greatest Generation represented the values that the whole Western world coalesced around. People today have forgotten those things. Casual Trump voters don’t seem to be aware of the connections between democracy and liberalism [as in “classical liberalism”: individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise]. They’re being swept away by nonsense and all the political bullshit thrown at them. There’s no other way around it. And at some point we have to assign responsibility. In “Liar’s Circus,” I was really empathetic to all these people [traveling to Trump rallies] – genuinely so – men who had lost power through everything from losses of manufacturing to changes in gender roles. I’m very sympathetic to these people. But at the end of the day, it’s like, at a certain point, all of these people who are living in places subject to economic decline, for instance, and who are penalized for their lack of education – at some point, those people just have to get up off their asses and move to New York City or LA or a factory town in the South or wherever the jobs are and go to work. And, yeah, college is expensive, but there are community colleges.

Q   You’re talking about victimhood, a theme that runs strong through your book and the MAGA movement. The White House sent me a list of its guests for Trump’s State of the Union address. Most are in some way victims. You’ll look in vain for people who, say, run a soup kitchen for the poor. Guests included a 15-year-old Texas girl who was the victim of computer-generated deepfakes created by a bully at her school and the wife and daughters of Corey Comperatore, the former firefighter and MAGA disciple killed by the gunman who also shot at Trump during that campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024. One Trump honoree is 13-year-old Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a Houston youth suffering brain cancer, notwithstanding the fact that the Trump administration eliminated child cancer research funding – what one observer described as “a perfect encapsulation of MAGA morality.”

Hoffman   This explains the role of immigrants and trans people in the movement. There needs to be a target, an “other,” and that’s what those people are for this administration. Look, at the end of the day, for the Trump administration, it’s purely about power. It’s not really about making government more efficient, it’s not about reducing the deficit, it’s all about power and they’re building that power on victimhood, if you’ve been a “victim,” and exploiting that victimhood. One of the political talking points for the GOP for the last 20 or 30 years – really since Reagan – was about resentment over your money going to help inner-city black people, even though that was not always true – more poor whites were on public assistance than urban blacks. [Figures in 2024 indicate this remains true.] Nonetheless the pitch was your money was going to help these people and this country isn’t built on help [public assistance], it’s built on Horatio Alger themes [stories of poor boys triumphing over impoverished backgrounds through hard work and gaining middle-class security and respectability].

Trump speaks of political enemies and persecution during his March 25, 2023 rally in Waco

Q   Your book reminds me of the Waco rally of March 2023 that I attended. It was one for the history books. It was the first Trump rally where, upon his arrival from the sky, rallygoers were invited to stand and pledge allegiance as a video played on huge screens showing pitiful January 6 inmates languishing behind bars and Trump filmed in scenes of presidential pomp and patriotism with backdrops such as Mount Rushmore and massive coliseum crowds. The video soundtrack, which played as the Waco crowd recited the pledge, involved a recording of Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance while a jailhouse choir of J6ers sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Did anything happen in all the rallies you attended that compares?

Hoffman   No. And, of course, January 6 hadn’t happened yet. But the scene you describe – there’s no other way to say it – is a perversion of everything that America stands for and all of its values. It’s a complete flipping of them. But every Trump rally was like that to some degree. That’s why the book was called “Liar’s Circus.” I don’t like the idea of living in a bubble in which there is no truth, in which truth is inverted. And it’s a masterstroke for Trump that he was able to do that, to flip things and make hot cold and dark light. I mean, to say [Ukrainian President] Zelensky is a dictator and is responsible for the invasion of his own country – that’s not a nuanced thing, it’s not something that scholars can agree to disagree on. It’s an actual inversion of the truth.

Q   It's pretty astounding – Kremlin talking points are echoed by Trump and in a day or so your neighbors down the street are saying it too!

Hoffman   It’s beyond me. I mean, you can say these people don’t know their history, but why do you and I think differently? How is it that Liz Cheney, with whom I don’t agree on anything politically or policy-wise but who I admire because she stands for the truth – how did it get to be that she emerges as a truthteller? The question growing up for me was always: How could Hitler have taken power? How could this have happened? How could people have gone along with the Holocaust, the murder of six million people, the premeditated, meticulously synchronized murder of six million people? And it’s not just Germany but Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain. Look at the military junta in Argentina and Brazil and Pinochet in Chile. How could people go along with that?

Q   We’re seeing more evidence of this in the United States.

Hoffman   It’s a revelation. I didn’t realize people were so easily manipulated, but they are. In my book, my editor suggested [in 2020] that I take out these references to Hitler, that it’s not really that bad. And I said no, I think there really is a comparison. I feel that way even more now. I mean, 2025 is not 1933 and Trump is not Hitler. People are confused and misled by trying to be too literal. They’re different people. The thing about Trump is he has no real ideology. He’s just a sociopathic narcissist. I don’t say that in a flippant way. I think honestly, deep down, that’s the thing driving him – sheer, unadulterated power. I think that’s what the tariffs are about. He’s brought America to its knees; now he needs to do it to the whole world. That’s what Panama and Greenland and Ukraine are about. And I think people don’t grasp that enough. Musk may have an agenda. His agenda may be tech getting rid of regulations that impinge on the growth of his companies and his crazy techno dreams. That’s the case of the tech bros. But Trump just wants power. That’s all he wants, all he cares about. And that is different from Hitler to a certain extent. But the gutting of institutions and the rule of law – things are happening very quickly with Trump while larger things will take more time – but I believe that, unchecked, and I mean unchecked by the Supreme Court which may or may not happen, we don’t know, Trump will come after the media, he will try to suppress the mainstream media. I mean, already the Washington Post is self-censoring. He’s going to go after television news, I think there’s going to be a case somewhere down the line in which he tries to sue or the Justice Department goes after a reporter, a specific reporter like at the New York Times, and I think it’s going to go all the way. I don’t think there’s any stopping Trump. I guess it’s up to the Supreme Court or the people in some way, but I believe Trump is so insane that he has to dominate everyone and everything and that no one can be undominated by Donald Trump.

Q   I’m afraid the Supreme Court of the United States has in many ways led us to this point, whether in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission or Trump v. United States.

Hoffman   And I’m not confident they’re going to be the bulwark we need them to be. I mean, these people – [Justices Samuel] Alito and Clarence Thomas – are really something. Can you imagine being a Supreme Court justice and taking a $250,000 RV and food and housing and all these things [from wealthy, influential patrons] and never thinking these are things you need to report and actually saying it’s not corruption when it’s the very definition of corruption?

Q   Did past experiences immersing yourself in the cultures of Borneo and New Guinea tribes [resulting in the Hoffman books “The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure” and “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art”] help you understand what political scientists describe as tribalism or the MAGA psyche? Two key features of tribalism figure around hierarchy and obedience.

Hoffman   You say hierarchy and obedience, but it’s more complex. There’s ritual, a lot of ritual – and Trump is all about the ritual. The rallies are rituals, the wearing of colors, the regalia, the flags mounted on pickup trucks with slogans like “Don’t Tread on Me.” All of these are rituals about identity. Tribalism by definition has an “in” group and an “out” group. You know, like the Asmat, the people who killed Michael Rockefeller in 1961, people with whom I spent a lot of time – and they’re not doing that [cannibalism] today – but at the time of Rockefeller’s death, villages were in constant warfare with each other. If you were members of one village, you were enemies of another village. Nazism was built on portraying as “others” the Jews, Eastern Europeans, the Poles – and Trumpism is about making “others” of immigrants and trans people. The role of immigrants in this country – I don’t think Trumpism is going to change that in any particular way. He’s not going to expel all those people. All of this is performative. If you do the math, you can see it’s never going to happen. But “Liar’s Circus” was built on spending a lot of time with these people [Trumpers], spending a lot of empathetic time with them. I mean, I enjoyed my time with them for the most part. The friendships I made were genuine in the sense that it’s not like I liked everyone but, well, [Trump rallygoer] Rick Frazier’s been to my house since the book came out. These were friendships.

Q   Even though they know you’re on the other side of all this?

Hoffman   Oh, yeah. I couldn’t have done what I did if I’d just gone in there and said to these people, “You’re a fucking racist!”

Q   Well, it’s obvious in the book you enjoyed these people. I enjoyed those I met at the Waco Trump rally, though over eight hours of interviews they were exhausting in their giddiness and obsessiveness and detachment from reality. There’s something charming if naïve about them.

Hoffman   They’re funny as hell. They have a zest for life and a joyfulness. It was all kind of a big party. That’s really what it was. The point is with these tribes in Borneo and New Guinea, you can’t just parachute in there as a journalist and demonstrate attitudes about them. You have to be open and listening and be willing to give of yourself. And so the process is the same [in gaining insights from Trump fans].

Q   One individual from our area who participated in the January 6 insurrection is something of a keyboard warrior. He didn’t fight any cops – he let all the other guys fight the cops – and then he strolled into the U.S. Capitol. He got several months in prison. I spent a summer just following his social-media group, patterned after the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s. They continually posted memes that seemed to yearn for a world somewhere between two Mel Gibson flicks – "The Patriot" and "Braveheart." Some of those individuals peppering your book would seem to qualify but I may be wrong.

Hoffman   No, I think you’re right actually. They long for an easier, more black-and-white time. A lot of them seem to yearn for a world of the 1950s. But we’re not in that world today and I don’t think we can go back. And look at all Trump is doing. Is the government really going to be more efficient? That is, are you going to get more [government] efficiency with less [personnel staffed to do jobs of public service]? All the people who voted for Trump – are their lives going to be better? Is inflation going to go down? Is the price of gas going to go down? Is the air going to be cleaner? Are they going to get their masculinity back? Are they going to get back to the days of men going to work in a mine or a factory where they’re making good money and they’re supporting their families and they feel good about themselves and their wives look at them and bat their eyelashes when they get home and they can afford one or two cars on their salaries? I could be completely wrong, but I think by the end of Trumpism, when it comes, the world is going to be more brutal, more violent with fewer government services and the deficit isn’t going to be any lower and things are going to be more expensive and there’s going to be less humanity because AI is all about getting rid of people. And the less we go shopping, the less we go to work, the less whole we are and the more separate we are from each other and the things that matter and give us meaning. Trumpism isn’t going to give any of the things that the people who voted for it imagine.

Q   It’s odd. When I tell people I spent eight solid hours interviewing folks in the MAGA crowd at the 2023 Trump rally in Waco – this was before Trump actually arrived – some of my friends say, “Oh, my God, how awful!” But the Trump folks could not have been more accommodating. One thing my friends don’t understand is that Trump loves press. Nothing means more to him than the chance of making headlines and getting attention, even if a lot of it is just to stir people up in ways that often backfire. The press coordinators of the rally, who determined ahead of time whether or not I got press credentials, and how I was treated at the actual rally – they could not have been more accommodating, even though Trump went through his usual showmanship bit during the rally, pointing at reporters and photographers in the risers and vilifying them to the crowd’s amusement. Ironically, some of the press in the risers with me were from “news organizations” that are little more than propagandist agencies for him. I watched one of these “reporters” go to the barricades that cordoned off press from the MAGA crowd awaiting Trump. That’s where this one “reporter” fired wildly provocative questions at the crowd, just to get them baited and stirred up for Trump.

Hoffman   You know, as a reporter, people often ask – and I’m sure they ask you this – “Were people willing to talk?” People love to talk about themselves. I like to talk about myself. And people [at these rallies] were almost unfailingly nice.

Q   The rallies are a big party. If you approach individual Trumpers on, say, a street corner, they might feel threatened, they might clam up. But at the Trump rally they’re among their own and they’re having a good time, flying massive flags on pickup trucks and buying Trump souvenirs and listening to music by people like Ted Nugent. So they’re tickled to talk with you.

Hoffman   Yeah, and I’m a middle-aged straight white guy so they don’t see a perceived threat from me, you know. I haven’t called them a racist or anything. I didn’t berate them or call them out in my first conversations with them. And I was a genuinely curious person.

Trump supporters overwhelm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to halt certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Q   Did the January 6 insurrection or riot or protest or however you want to label it surprise you, given all the time you spent at Trump rallies in 2019 and 2020 and the friendships you cultivated with individual people attending these rallies?

Hoffman   It did not surprise me at all. I mean, you’re always slightly surprised at any event. You know, when, say, the Russians actually attack Ukraine, and you’re asked, “Well, were you really surprised Russia attacked?” The answer is no, but the moment of anything can still be a little surprising. But so much of the book, the subtext, of “Liar’s Circus,” of the feeling that I had through the experience of listening to Trump and watching him work the crowd and the down-ballot people – governors, senators and representatives in attendance of whatever state he was speaking in who usually gathered there in mass – it was the gathering together of a crowd and the power. As Elias Canetti put it in his book “Crowds and Power” (1960), that’s the point of the rallies – to, on one hand, create this kind of cult following – but the larger point should never be lost and that’s power. The power of the mob, the power of the crowd, was always on display.  It’s the roar of the crowd when Trump stood up on stage and mocked Marco Rubio and belittled him. That was the power of the crowd over Rubio to toe the line, the power of the crowd to go primary someone and vote them out of power. Trump’s power – originally as a populist – involved this power of the crowd. So what happened on January 6 [after President Trump’s fiery speech about a stolen election earlier in the day and his exhortation “to fight like hell”] didn’t surprise me at all. I mean, that was the plan.

Q   What stunned me is that many of these people for so long talked about the Constitution and respect for the police and the rule of the law – and then one day you turn on the TV and they’re overrunning the U.S. Capitol and pummeling cops with clubs and flag poles. It struck me as such a broad statement of hypocrisy.

Hoffman   It is. I mean, what’s happening right now with [the Department of Governmental Efficiency under Musk’s controversial direction] and deportations and the courts – they’re obviously contemptuous of the rule of law. The rule of law for Donald Trump is the rule of Donald Trump. The state becomes Donald Trump. Those are the elements of anti-democratic populism, still within [the framework] of a democracy as in the first Trump term and the evolving nature of the second term which is moving from populism into something more nefarious and more dangerous. I think sometimes we talk about Nazism and fascism and people get hung up on those ideas of the 1930s. But these terms on their own are describing a kind of authoritarian dictatorship in broader terms in which will triumphs over reason, in which action is everything, in which efficiency and the trains running on time are the ideas used to – well, it’s not really about making the trains run on time, it’s not really about making government efficient, it’s about power. And part of fascism is the equation of state with the man. The man becomes the state and that’s what Trump is doing. He is the Constitution, he is the law and if [as a judge] you rule against him in a court, then you’re a “lunatic judge.”

Q   A friend who spent his career in upper management of two or three major corporations but still believes in such things as democracy and the rule of law told me the other day that, since the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, he has undergone therapy because he simply cannot imagine or accept an American electorate of 77 million people putting this guy back in power. Given your understanding of what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what some would say is happening today, most recently with this constitutional crisis involving the federal judiciary and a Trump Department of Justice that clearly does not respect the federal judiciary, how do you find it possible to continue to be friends with people such as Rick and Rick and Gale? How do you emotionally and rationally put aside what they’re clearly contributing to and still be friends?

Hoffman   Well, I can’t really. I haven’t spoken to them this year at all. In the runup to the book and after its publication, I talked with Rick Frazier and Gale. But I haven’t talked with them in a long time. January 6 was kind of a watershed moment for me. I found it hard to listen to Rick, who I appreciate as a good man. But I found it difficult to listen to his support of something that was so obviously egregious. We had reached the point where there was no sugarcoating it anymore. So I really haven’t talked to them. I mean, if Rick called, I would be kind to him and I wouldn’t rule out, you know, having a beer with him or something. But it would be hard to. And this goes back to your question about the people [in MAGA] who aren’t rich and aren’t just voting out of greed and why they support Trump. Well, they support him for all the reasons in the book but, on another level, I can’t say why people support Trump. Again, one of the great mysteries to me growing up in the time I did was always how people could rationalize the KKK or how people could have supported Hitler. These seem such aberrations to me. It was once so obvious that everyone in America – even with racism in the South – in World War II and afterward with all the talk of the Greatest Generation – that someone raising their arm in a fascist salute a la Hitler or Mussolini, even as a joke, back in the 1960s, Seventies and Eighties, would have been seen as abhorrent. We’ve always had whackos that never go away, but these were minorities. If anyone had done that [in past decades], they would have been castigated by the left and the right, by Republicans and Democrats.

Q   We as a people seem to have lost that post-World War II virtue.

Hoffman   The Trumpers will always say, when someone like Elon Musk raises his arm like that, it’s just a joke, they’re just trolling liberals, they’re “just trying to get a rise out of you.” That’s like a man saying abusive things to a woman and when the woman gets upset, the man says, “Oh, I’m just joking.” Well, it’s not a joke. This isn’t something to joke about. But another thing that we don’t always fully understand – especially liberal Democrats, and this is something I’m grappling with even now – is the extent to which the media and the pillars of what we think of as the truth [are being abandoned]. I mean, my go-to source, if I had to name one, is the New York Times. I believe in it. I don’t think it’s a religious belief, but I think the reporting of the New York Times is largely accurate. It’s probably the best source of accurate information about America and the world and things in general. But I’ve found that people just don’t read the newspaper anymore. And it’s not just the right – many liberals don’t read newspapers either. It’s all social media, it’s all “influencers.” I know a couple, I met them at a bar near my house because they’re neighbors, it turns out. This has nothing to do with journalism or anything – these are very lefty YouTubers and they have in the neighborhood of a million followers and their fulltime job is kind of being left-wing pundits by YouTube. And I’d never heard of them before. Yet a million people follow them and prefer that to the New York Times. And in that world are some 70 million or 80 million people locked in that right-wing information bubble and they don’t see anything else.        

This interview was conducted, condensed and edited for clarity and brevity by retired Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill Whitaker.