On God and Baseball

The Cathedral of St. Louis (Busch Stadium for the uninitiated)

Like Annie in the movie Bull Durham, I believe in the Church of Baseball. Religion and baseball may have nothing to do with each other, but baseball frequently operates in the same domain as religion. Watch any game during the defining moments of a pennant race and you will see hundreds of fans in the late innings with their eyes closed, hands folded in prayer, seeking heavenly blessings for their beloved players and teams. The players themselves appear to sense that God has a stake in the outcome of their games. They cross themselves as they step to the plate. They point to the heavens when they hit a home run or strike out an opposing batter. Certainly, God is not neutral in the affairs of baseball.

I am a rational human being. I accept scientific truths and accumulated knowledge of empirical research. Although my religious upbringing instilled in me a belief in God, as an adult my religious leanings are full of doubt and skepticism. And yet, while I cannot explain it, there are times in my life I have felt God’s presence. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The moment we utter the name of God we leave the level of scientific thinking and enter the realm of the ineffable … which by its very nature lies beyond our comprehension.”

All of this leads to a fundamental question: Is God even a baseball fan? Certainly, God has no love for the powerful Yankees, the money-drenched Dodgers, or any of the evil teams that oppose the Cardinals and all their inherent goodness. In a just world, would not God intervene to ensure my beloved Cardinals won the World Series every season?

I know for certain that God was asleep at the switch when he (or she) allowed the Boston Red Sox to break the Curse of the Bambino in 2004. I did not object when God allowed the Red Sox, down three-games-to-none, to miraculously win the last four games and defeat the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series. But I can only conclude that other worldly matters distracted God when he allowed the Sox to sweep the 105-win Cardinals in that season’s World Series. Now, some people claim the Red Sox won because they played better baseball than the Yankees and Cardinals over that eight-game stretch. But you don’t really believe this, do you?

I am kidding, of course. I know God has nothing to do with how the Cardinals do on any given day or season. But I am convinced that each game’s outcome is determined by the coffee mug I choose to drink from each morning. When I open the kitchen cabinet and reach for that day’s mug, I think carefully about which one will provide the magic to help my team win that night. So far this season, I have chosen correctly 13 of 21 times, pretty good for a team not expected to do a whole lot of winning this year.

Is it possible that my lifelong attachment to the St. Louis Cardinals, a team for which I have no geographical or familial connection, arises from the same aura of ineffability to which Rabbi Heschel attests, that inexplicable, spiritual dimension of human experience that touches the core of our existence? I have been pondering such questions ever since reading Baseball as a Road to God (Gotham Books, 2013) by former New York University president John Sexton, and watching Baseball: Beyond Belief, the companion documentary, which aired recently on FS1.

Sexton is the former President of New York University and Dean of NYU Law School, who also holds a PhD in history of American religion. His book originated from a seminar he designed on baseball and religion, which contends that “baseball can show us more about our world and ourselves than we might have thought” and “can demonstrate the benefits of living a little slower, of noticing a little more, and of embracing life’s ineffable beauties.” Sexton does not literally contend that baseball provides an avenue to God, or that we should take too seriously the connection between baseball and religion. But he does seek to show parallels between baseball, faith, and spirituality.

Baseball, like religion, is full of sacred places and sacred times. Ballparks are cathedrals, a place where the faithful gather and commune. And much like the devoutly religious among us, the baseball fan’s innermost thoughts are filled with elements of faith, doubt, the hope for miracles, a belief in superstitions and myths, blessings and curses, saints and sinners, and a longing for community.

As noted by Sexton, just as the world’s great religions mark significant events on their holiest of days—Passover and Yom Kippur in Judaism; Christmas and Easter in Christianity; Ramadan in Islam—baseball has Opening Day, a time of rebirth and renewal, when every team gets a fresh start and the sins of the past are forgiven in the hope of new beginnings. Most religions point to an ultimate destination, the Road to Damascus, the Promised Land, the search for eternal salvation. In baseball, the postseason playoffs are baseball’s high holy days, and the World Series is the Promised Land. The only way to get there is to overcome adversity and be tested along the way. It is why all 30 major league teams play a long, drawn-out season of 162 games.

Within each season there are moments of heightened awareness, memorable events that become part of baseball mythology; a come-from-behind win, a walk off home run, a remarkable catch. These are the shared experiences of parents and children, brothers and sisters, and close friends that become sacred stories of baseball memories. In any ballpark, Sexton writes, “magic can happen, and the fan can be transported to a space and time beyond, to an experience we know profoundly but cannot put into words.”

Some of the oldest and most historic parks are considered especially sacred spaces, including Wrigley Field in Chicago, Fenway Park in Boston, and Yankee Stadium in New York. Yankee Stadium also contains Monument Park, where the Ghosts of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe Dimaggio, and Mickey Mantle are forever memorialized. On the University of Pittsburgh campus is the remnant of the outfield wall of old Forbes Field, marking where Bill Mazeroski hit the walk-off home run that defeated the Yankees in Game Seven of the 1960 World Series. To this day, people gather at the historical marker every October 13 and play a recording of the radio broadcast to relive that memorable moment in time.

Baseball, like religion, is also about community. After September 11, when the Yankees reached the World Series, it helped unite a city in pain and allowed a period of national healing. Even though the Yankees lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks, that series demonstrated baseball’s power to bring people together and celebrate America.

In Baseball as a Road to God, Sexton tells the story of when he and his best friend Dougie ran home from Catholic grade school on October 4, 1955, to catch the end of the seventh game of the World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. As they put on the radio at Sexton’s house, they both placed their hands on a crucifix, got down on their knees, and prayed as they listened to the play-by-play. For the final three innings, they stayed on their knees until the Dodgers recorded the final out and became World Champions. For Sexton, it remains one of the most significant days of his life, an occurrence he only half-jokingly refers to as one of the twelve greatest events of world history. For him, it is a sacred memory.

Of course, as Sexton suggests, what is sacred for one person is not sacred for another. For Muslims, the Dome of the Rock is revered as the site of Prophet Muhammed’s ascension to heaven. Others see only a beautiful work of architecture. For devout Catholics and liturgical Protestants, bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ as symbolized in the Eucharist. For the non-religious, it looks like the makings of a romantic picnic by the lake. Baseball is no different. For me, there is nothing special about the Dodgers, Brooklyn or otherwise, winning a World Series (apologies to Professor Sexton). But if the Cardinals ascend to the mountaintop, well then …

One thing all baseball fans share is a belief in miracles. Even the hard-core atheist understands that remaining loyal to one’s team in challenging times involves a leap of faith that, in any season, the impossible may occur. “A leap of faith,” writes Sexton, “is an embrace of feeling over logic, a willingness to loosen one’s dependence on the purely rational.”

My father experienced a leap of faith in 1951, when his New York Giants overcame a 13.5 game deficit in August to win the National League pennant on the final game of the year by Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. For long-standing Giants fans, that season is still remembered as the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff. The 1969 Miracle Mets and the “Ya Gotta Believe” 1973 Mets are two more examples of the impossible occurring. Ask any Mets fan old enough to have experienced those two seasons and you will hear similar and deeply embedded memories from all of them. And who can forget Kirk Gibson’s pinch hit home run in the 1988 World Series when he came off the bench with two crippled knees to win the game on one swing of the bat, leading to Vin Scully’s legendary call: “In a season that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” The fans of these teams, I dare say, believe in miracles to this day.

Speaking of miracles, can it be denied that the forces of destiny, or divine intervention, were in play when David Freese hit the game-tying triple with two outs in the bottom of the ninth in Game Six of the 2011 World Series that propelled the Cardinals to a miraculous, come-from-behind World Championship? I think not.

Of course, in religion and baseball, faith and doubt go together. As Sexton explains, “Doubt is at the core of baseball, touching every player and every fan. And doubt is central to the religious experience. They are not separate, they coexist. In baseball as in religion, doubt and faith are intertwined.” As a Cardinals fan, doubt is the essence of my existence. During my lifetime, I have seen too many blown saves in the ninth inning, too many times the Cardinals have blown three-game-to-one leads in the playoffs and the World Series, to ever allow confidence or a sense of calmness to enter my thoughts. When the Cardinals take a lead into the ninth inning, I think of all the different ways things can go badly. And far too often it happens. You aren’t paranoid if they really are out to get you.

And yet, the antidote to doubt is hope. Without hope, the fan cannot survive. I may doubt the Cards will pull out a win each game, but that is a psychological defense mechanism to fend off the dark clouds of despair that lingers should my hopes be crushed by a series of walks and hits and wild pitches resulting in a Cardinals loss. Hope may be deeply embedded in my soul. But only when the Cardinals record the final out and win the game can I finally exhale and experience a sense of calm and inner peace. At least until tomorrow night’s game.

There are certain events that lead to prolonged suffering and the belief in the minds of some fans that their teams have been cursed. Most of the great baseball curses arose from excessively long championship droughts, highlighted by a groundball through the first baseman’s legs (e.g., Bill Buckner in the 1986 World Series) and similar occurrences. Before the 2004 World Series, the Red Sox went 86 years without a World Championship. Did it really have nothing to do with the owner selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $125,000 after the 1919 season? Did the Curse of the Billy Goat, inflicted on the Cubs by Billy Sianis after he and his beloved pet goat were removed from Wrigley Field in Game Two of the 1945 World Series (due to the stench caused by the goat), really have nothing to do with the Cubs not reaching the World Series for another 71 years?

Yet again, other teams can lose for even longer stretches of time without any talk of curses. The Philadelphia Phillies did not win a championship for the first 97 years of the team’s existence, and no one in Philadelphia ever talked about The Curse of Connie Mack or anything of the sort. Phillies fans simply chalked it up to a century of bad baseball. And if any team deserved a curse, it was the Chicago White Sox, whose best players threw the 1919 World Series after accepting bribes from gangsters. Not until 2005, 88 years after their last championship, did the White Sox again win a World Series. And yet, fans on the South Side of Chicago accepted that, win or lose, it is about baseball, not curses. Oh, ye fans of little faith.

Baseball, of course, does not really provide a “road to God” and Sexton does not suggest otherwise. But baseball, writes Sexton, “calls us to live slow and notice.” Baseball is a timeless game. It proceeds at its own pace. It teaches us to breathe, to develop a heightened sensitivity to the specialness of our lives. For three hours each day, it forces us to slow down, to set aside the noise and speed of everyday life. Our lives are never slow for long, yet baseball “can awaken us to a dimension of life often missing in our contemporary world of hard facts and hard science. We can learn, through baseball, to experience life more deeply.”

Perhaps in the end, the former President of Yale University and commissioner of major league baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, best explained the essence of baseball as a spiritual journey, when he wrote:

Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can go home again but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once more, the bat an oar over the shoulder, until there is an end to all journeying. 

The Death of a Great American Newspaper

I began reading The Washington Post in the summer of 1982 when I moved to Washington, D.C., to attend law school. Ben Bradlee was then Executive Editor, and I immediately fell in love with the paper. After Bradlee retired in 1991, Leonard Downie, Jr., and later Marty Baron filled Bradlee’s shoes with equal competence and skill. When I moved to Philadelphia at the end of 1995, I missed The Post as much as anything else about Washington.

The Post’s reporting was hard hitting and fair, the writing excellent, its political analysis and coverage of domestic politics and government the best in the world. With foreign bureaus in twenty-one countries, The Post’s international coverage rivaled that of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But what I most liked about The Washington Post was its well-rounded and comprehensive coverage as a hometown newspaper. Its first-rate national and international reporting was supplemented by one of the best Sports sections in the country, with writers like Thomas Boswell, John Feinstein, Sally Jenkins, Christine Brennan, and the legendary Shirley Povich. The paper had a vibrant Metro section that provided detailed coverage of local affairs in Northern Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. And the Style section, the first of its kind when created in 1972, introduced literary journalism through innovative and imaginative articles on culture and the arts, profiles of engaging personalities, and interesting aspects of life that provided energy and elan to the daily news and inspired lifestyle sections in newspapers across the country.

The paper became famous in 1971 when it published the Pentagon Papers, the 7,000-page study commissioned by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The historical import of the documents was explosive, for they proved that the government’s official pronouncements about American involvement in the war were incomplete and untrue. The Post’s decision to publish occurred days after the Department of Justice obtained a court order prohibiting The New York Times from further publishing the documents on the grounds that it threatened national security. Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, and The Post’s leadership courageously defied the Nixon administration’s threats to prosecute the Washington Post Company for publishing in alleged violation of the Espionage Act. The paper risked everything and won a seminal Supreme Court victory along with the New York Times in defense of the First Amendment.

Of course, it was The Post’s single-handed pursuit of what became the Watergate scandal that cemented its reputation as a world-class newspaper. Following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972, two young and inexperienced Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relentlessly investigated every aspect of the case. Through their hard work, and with the support and guidance of talented editors, we learned of illegal surveillance activities, cover-ups, and corruption that implicated the top levels of government. The Post’s reporting exposed the abuses of power that led to Nixon’s resignation. By digging for facts in the early stages of the story, before it became a scandal and when it seemed almost no other news outlet wanted to touch it, The Washington Post stood alone and proved that courageous journalism, combined with thorough fact checking and high ethical standards, is essential to a thriving democracy.

Two of the best journalism movies of all time are All the President’s Men, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portraying Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate scandal, and Spotlight, about the unflinching investigation by The Boston Globe into the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse coverup in the early 2000s. The Globe investigation occurred under the editorial leadership of Marty Baron, who would later become Executive Editor of The Washington Post. Both films revealed the unglamorous side of the news business, the drudgery of reporting, everything that occurs before an article is published—fact checking, running down leads, reading through old court filings and phone books (when they were still a thing), dead-end phone calls and door knocking, the difficulty of persuading reluctant sources to talk, and typing up a story late at night on strict deadlines, only to have the editor question the reliability of sources or the soundness of the reported facts. And the films showed why important news stories require time, resources, and a publisher willing to let reporters and editors do their jobs.

Good journalism not only searches for the truth and provides facts about key events, but also explains things, embraces ideas, and places the news in context. Apart from The New York Times, for the past half century no U.S. paper has been better at this than The Washington Post. After I left Washington in the mid-1990s, I continued to read The Post whenever I could find a copy at a local newsstand. In 2014, I subscribed to the digital edition of the paper. By then, like most papers throughout the United States, The Post struggled to make a profit. But despite financial constraints, under the stewardship of the Graham family, the paper continued to provide world-class reporting and writing and remained a full-service, all-around great paper with some of the best writing on domestic politics, the workings of the federal government, foreign affairs, sports, books, and culture.

I was concerned when Jeff Bezos, who had no prior experience with newspapers, bought The Post from the Graham family in 2013. But his wealth offered a means to restore financial stability and expand the paper’s news coverage at a time when public accountability and transparency were suffering due to hundreds of newspapers failing across the country. When Bezos bought The Post for $250 million, which then represented one percent of his net worth of $25 billion, he promised to maintain The Post’s high-quality reporting and ethical standards. When he met with the paper’s staff shortly after purchasing the paper, he predicted a new “golden era” for The Post and said:

The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain [with] its readers and not [with] the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads…. Journalism plays a critical role in a free society, and The Washington Post—as the hometown paper of the capital city of the United States—is especially important.

For the next eleven years, and throughout Trump’s first term as president, Bezos maintained a hands-off policy and financially supported the paper’s mission. He did not interfere in the paper’s editorial decisions or news coverage. I remained impressed with the paper’s resolute and in-depth reporting even in the face of President Trump’s lies, unfair verbal assaults, and threats of lawsuits and adverse regulatory actions.

As the 2024 elections approached, and as a second Trump term became a real possibility, things began to change. In October, Bezos overruled The Post’s editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris ending The Post’s long-standing, well-considered history of endorsing presidential candidates. Bezos’s decision to censor the Harris endorsement so upset the paper’s readership that 250,000 people almost immediately canceled their subscriptions. Although I was angry at Bezos for his cowardly act to appease Trump, I remained a subscriber. There were still excellent reporters employed there who I wished to support.

Following the election, The Post’s news coverage remained first-rate. The paper reported daily on the administration’s actions and executive orders that threatened to radically alter American life and the traditional workings of government. It published detailed and thoroughly fact-checked reports on Trump’s efforts to financially and corruptly benefit from his office, outlaw diversity, equity, and inclusion from American life, cut life-saving medical and scientific research, reverse sixty years of U.S. “soft” power abroad by shutting down USAID and other foreign aid agencies, attack free speech on college campuses, weaponize the Justice Department and seek retribution against his political adversaries, fire thousands of dedicated government workers and impose loyalty tests on those who remained, threaten our closest allies, and overturn the rules-based international order.

Unfortunately, Bezos made clear by his actions that his personal wealth and commercial interests were more important than protecting the reputation and survival of a great American newspaper. In early 2025, he imposed a new editorial policy: Henceforth, Washington Post editorials would address only issues touching upon personal freedom and free markets. The well-respected opinion editor, David Shipley, abruptly resigned, as did the paper’s best political opinion writers, including Ruth Marcus, Jennifer Rubin, Philip Bump, Jonathan Capehart, Eugene Robinson, and Catherine Rampell. Bezos hired a new, conservative opinion editor. So much for his hands-off policy. And despite contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and spending $40 million on the making of the vanity film Melania, Bezos then implemented deep budget cuts that threaten The Post’s long-term existence.

The cuts imposed by Bezos were devastating. He fired hundreds of reporters, including most of the paper’s foreign correspondents. He eliminated bureaus in the Middle East and Ukraine, which included four Pulitzer Prize finalists and reporters who risked their lives in conflict zones. He ended the Metro and highly revered Sports sections. Although he kept the Style section, he fired its excellent arts and culture critics, eliminated the stand-alone Books section, and limited The Post’s primary focus to covering politics and government, although his drastic spending cuts have significantly compromised that coverage. Because of the financial and editorial decisions imposed by Bezos, the paper has become a shadow of what it used to be. By September, I had enough. Despite my love for this revered paper, I cancelled my subscription.

Violating all his promises, Bezos has destroyed one of America’s great independent newspapers. NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg has written that “journalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It depends on institutions willing to support it, audiences willing to listen, and journalists willing to take risks.” Sometimes, the most impactful stories “are hiding in plain sight, buried in archives, waiting for someone to connect the dots.” Although Bezos is among the five richest people in the world and currently has a net worth of $224 billion, he has chosen to treat The Washington Post as a run-of-the mill business rather than the public trust he acquired. His failure to protect and nurture an institution whose independence he promised to uphold when we need good journalism more than ever to hold the powerful to account, and as the president of the United States and his cronies are engaged in the most sustained attack on a free press in American history, is heartbreaking.

Legally, Jeff Bezos is free to do what he wants with his money, even if it leads to The Post’s demise and destruction. This is the essence of capitalism, after all. But is there not a better way? Does Bezos believe in a free and independent press of which he spoke at the time of his purchase? Does he believe in The Post’s official slogan, created under his watch, that “democracy dies in darkness”? If not, why did he buy The Washington Post in the first place?

By simply committing a tiny fraction of his wealth, Bezos could easily restore The Washington Post to the great newspaper it once was. If he has lost interest in the cause of democratic accountability, he has other options. He should either sell the paper to someone who wants to nurture and sustain it or commit $2.5 billion (approximately 1.2% of his net worth) to establish a foundation that will operate the paper as a non-profit.

“[T]ruth alone isn’t always enough,” wrote Adam Penenberg. “The bigger battle … the one we’re still fighting today, isn’t just about getting the story. It’s about making sure there’s still a place to tell it.” Legacy should be an important consideration for Jeff Bezos, for his will define how people remember him and whether his life had meaning. He will be remembered not for the money he earned, but for what he created or destroyed along the way.

If things stay on their current path, Bezos will go down in history as the person who destroyed a great American newspaper. That he did so to protect his commercial interests by appeasing a narcissistic and irrationally hateful president will be his legacy. Bezos has the power to restore The Washington Post as a great institution of American democracy, one with a rich history of informing and educating the public and helping millions of people understand the key events that affect our country, our lives, and our futures. With immense wealth and privilege comes great responsibility. Mr. Bezos, what will your legacy be?

And Then Someday Was Yesterday

Around nineteen years ago, on a springlike day in early March, my daughter Jen, as part of a high school photography project, accompanied Hannah and me to a local baseball field, where she told me to relive my youthful days as a high school baseball player. As she snapped photos on her 35-millimeter camera, I recreated a moment of transcendence in the long arc of my life when I played baseball as if it were the most important thing in the world. From age seven to eighteen, from Little League through High School, I played the game with youthful abandon, and dreamed, like millions of other young American boys, that someday I would play in the major leagues.

Jen was inspired by a scene in the movie Field of Dreams (or, for literary purists, the novel Shoeless Joe) when Ray Kinsella talks with Archibald “Moonlight” Graham late at night and asks about his short-lived baseball career. Doc Graham was an old man at this point, but fifty years earlier, he had been a talented baseball player. He played three seasons in the minor leagues before the New York Giants called and allowed him to achieve his lifelong ambition of reaching the big leagues. In his short stint with the team, he played only one inning, as a defensive replacement in right field, and never got the chance to bat.

In Field of Dreams, Graham was portrayed by Burt Lancaster, who told Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) that, at season’s end, rather than enduring another year in the minors, he hung up his cleats and returned to his hometown of Chisolm, Minnesota, to become a family doctor. (In real life, Graham played four more seasons in the minor leagues, even as he pursued his medical degree). When Kinsella asked Graham what it was like to come so close to his dream and then have it pass him by, Graham answered, “We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there'll be other days.’ I didn't realize that that was the only day.”

For me, that was the most impactful line of the film, because it captured the improvidence of youth when we fail to recognize that the seemingly uneventful decisions we make early on influence much of our life’s journey. Every choice we make, every path we choose along the way opens and closes doors of opportunity. This is not necessarily unwelcome or undesired. For Doc Graham and the people of Chisolm, Minnesota, his choosing medicine over baseball improved the lives of hundreds of families for the next fifty years.

Kinsella later asks Graham, “If you had one wish, what would it be?” As Graham contemplated the question, one sensed that his mind wandered back to a time when, for a fleeting moment, he followed his dreams. Graham replied:

I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big-league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases - stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag… That is my wish!

The scene acknowledged the human capacity to dream of what might have been, even when the choices we make improve our outcomes. For every path we take, there are lost dreams and lost opportunities.

Jen used the quote in her photography project and had me play the role of Doc Graham, a man past his prime who contemplates the lost opportunities and dreams that passed him by. It was an easy role for me. My baseball life was more short-lived and less successful than Doc Graham’s. Although I intended to play baseball in college, when I went off to Wittenberg, my priorities changed. I began to value academics and other pursuits. Baseball was suddenly less important. The world became larger, and I wanted to see what was there.

Not unlike Doc Graham, my decision to bypass baseball worked out well, leading to a fulfilling career in law, government, and business for which I am grateful. But nearly fifty years later, I can still feel occasional pangs of regret, not because I continued to harbor hopes of becoming a professional ballplayer—I knew better by then—but because I missed out on four more years of playing baseball with fellow travelers and sharing a sense of camaraderie and purpose that only a true lover of the game can appreciate.

Later in life, amidst the stresses and anxieties, challenges and excitement of a professional legal career, my thoughts sometimes wandered to more carefree days when my brother and I invented differing versions of backyard baseball, from sock ball to wiffle ball to groundball games played on bumpy brown grass on hot summer afternoons. And I sometimes questioned my decision at the age of eighteen to not even try for a few more years of enraptured joy, the feeling a ballplayer experiences as he anticipates that day’s game and throws a ball with a teammate to loosen up before the start of play. Had I forgotten the smell of freshly cut grass and dirt, and the pure sound of the ball landing firmly in the pocket of my first baseman’s mitt? Did I no longer appreciate the air, wind, and sun pounding my face as I endured the challenges and setbacks, losses and failures and occasional triumphs, which are the beautiful American game? In my rush to adulthood, did I too easily dismiss the wonderment of baseball in my life?

I never thought much about growing old when I was young. Few of us ever do. I can still recall, at seven years old, impatiently wishing I were an older version of myself. I ached for responsibility, to prove myself worthy. When at the age of twelve my dad finally shifted summer lawn-mowing duty from my brother to me, I considered it a step toward manhood. Every Saturday, weather permitting, I filled the lawnmower’s gas tank, checked its oil, and pulled the chord (usually two or three times before it started) to begin this important task, which I assumed was essential to the security of the free world. And I did so with pride. The more sweat, dirt, and grit, the better.

In later years, only when I had to cut the grass at houses of my own, did I start to question why I had so enthusiastically embraced this tiresome and time-consuming chore. Now, it was simply something that had to be done during the precious few hours every weekend when I could relax. Eventually, I sold my lawnmower, hired a landscaper, and recaptured some lost time.

In my youth, I looked forward to the future, believing the best of life was ahead of me. I dreamed of exploring places that would expand my horizons beyond the limited confines of suburban New Jersey and southern Ohio. Armed with a college education that opened my mind to economics, history, and literature, I wished to experience life’s diversity and compete in the arena. And for the past forty years, I have done my best to live life with passion and gusto.

Like Doc Graham, although I would have liked to have stared down a big-league pitcher, I could not now imagine a different life, one that did not include law school, a career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and later as a managing director of a prestigious consulting firm, where I investigated police departments, corporate malfeasance, and the high profile problems confronting university presidents. My career has affected the lives of many people and invested in me responsibilities I never imagined as a sixteen-year-old first baseman picking rushed throws in the dirt from fellow infielders. I am blessed and grateful for the life I have led, and for the life, love, and family I have. For those choices, I have no regrets, and would not change anything.

But whenever I come across a local high school or college game at the park near our house, I stop to watch, if only for a few minutes, so I can take in the sights and sounds of the game as it was played when I was young, with innocence, pure joy, and a love for the game. “If this sounds like a romantic or foolish impulse to us today,” wrote Roger Angell in Let Me Finish (Harcourt, 2006), “it is because most of American life, including baseball, no longer feels feasible. We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it.”

When we are young, we think the future is ours for the making, that time is unlimited. We look forward to someday, when we will master the art of life, accomplish important things, better the world, leave our mark, and build a legacy. “Someday,” I used to tell myself, “I will write the great American novel.” “Someday, I will travel the world and embrace new countries and cultures and ways of life.” And when I was still young enough to dream, I said, “Someday, I will play professional baseball.” And then, one day I woke up and realized that someday was yesterday. Where time was once on my side, suddenly it vanished.

Today, whenever I am at a major league game, I pay attention to the players between innings, when the first baseman tosses groundballs to the infielders, the pitcher throws his warmups, and the outfielders play long toss. I sometimes imagine what it must be like to play at that level, and how I would have loved to have had that chance. But then I realize a painful and obvious truth, one understood by all of us dreamers and recognized by Roger Angell more than sixty years ago for The New Yorker, “that we never made it. We would never know the rich joke that doubled over three young pitchers in front of the dugout; we would never be part of that golden company on the field, which each of us, certainly for one moment of his life, had wanted more than anything else in the world to join.”

The First Rough Draft of History from Berlin: Appreciating Sigrid Schultz

Sigrid Schultz, Chicago Tribune reporter in pre-War Berlin

Speaking with a group of foreign correspondents in London in 1963, Philip L. Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post, contended that the role of journalists was to engage in the “impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.” It was an apt description of a news reporter’s job to educate and inform the public in a fast-paced, ever-changing world. Good journalists may not get everything completely right in their “first rough drafts of history” but, when done with care and integrity, their work is essential to an informed citizenry and functioning democracy. Graham’s description succinctly captures the importance of deadline journalism to help us understand world events as they happen before we can fully comprehend how today’s events will impact our lives tomorrow.

I thought of Graham’s comment while reading The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany (Beacon Press, 2024) by historian Pamela D. Toler. The book details the life and career of Sigrid Schultz, a trailblazing female journalist who witnessed and wrote about the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany during her time as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1919 to 1941. Toler gives a vivid account of Germany’s turmoil and volatility, which Schultz experienced as the Tribune’s central European correspondent and Berlin bureau chief during the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, and the start of World War II. Schultz provided more news about what was really happening in Germany and Europe than any other journalist of her time. Her context and analysis warned readers back home about the threatening storms brewing in Germany and why they should be taken seriously.

Born in Chicago, Schultz became an American ex-pat at the age of eight, when her family moved to Germany in 1901 so her artist father could seek commissions painting portraits of wealthy Europeans. The family later moved to Paris, where Schultz pursued her education, before returning to Germany in 1913. Schultz taught French and English in Berlin during World War I, and she would spend most of the next thirty years there. Fluent in French, German, and Norwegian, her experiences shaped her understanding of history and growing fascination with politics and world events. Notwithstanding the disadvantages of her gender during that era, she was ready-made to be a journalist.

Before the start of World War I, most American newspapers did not invest in on-the-ground foreign news coverage. That all changed once the United States entered the war in April 1917, when dozens of American newspapers sent hundreds of reporters to Europe. When the war ended in 1919, several papers, including the Chicago Tribune, established news bureaus in the major European cities. Dick Little, a veteran war correspondent for the Tribune, became the paper’s first Berlin bureau chief. Little hired Schultz as an interpreter and cub reporter. Schultz proved to be a quick study, and with her grasp of languages and understanding of German politics and history, she soon became Little’s “number two man in Berlin.”

As it happens, Berlin was a mecca of news in the spring of 1919. As Schultz explained years later, “all the elements of the next twenty, thirty years were right there, visible.” As noted by Toler, Berlin at that time was a “political hot spot … marked by repeated economic crises, constant street battles, and frequent, occasionally violent, political challenges” from the most extreme elements on the left and the right. Schultz had personal contacts that no other reporter in Berlin could match. And Little, as one of the most skilled and experienced reporters around, taught Schultz the importance of accuracy and precision when reporting the news, including the need to corroborate information gleaned from sources. “No proof, no story.”

In 1925, Schultz became the first woman to head a foreign news bureau when the Tribune appointed her as Berlin bureau chief. While increasing numbers of women were becoming journalists, with a few notable exceptions most were confined to reporting “soft news” such as fashion and society news. Schultz was the only female bureau chief of any news organization until after World War II.

When she first became bureau chief, Germany was in the middle of the “Golden Twenties” enjoying an artistic and intellectual blossoming. The economy was on its way to recovery, the German mark had stabilized, and at least on the floor of the Reichstag (German parliament), the political landscape was relatively calm. The National Socialist Party was not yet a political power.

In 1929, Germany’s illusion of stability began to crack, first with a severe cold wave in February that caused widespread food and energy shortages, and then with the start of the Great Depression following the stock market crash in October. Soon, the German economy spiraled downward, unemployment skyrocketed and, as Toler notes, “the hungry, the frustrated, and the desperate sought solace in the promises of political parties at both extremes.” The Communist Party’s membership more than tripled from 1928 to 1932, while that of the National Socialist Party increased tenfold. As Schultz reported based on first-hand observations, Berlin’s workers, who had previously looked to the Communists and Socialists, were now being drawn to the promise of a nationalist utopia coming from the Nazi Party.

Schultz’s reporting helped her readers understand the differences between the various political factions that dominated German events in 1930. Unlike her competitors at other newspapers, she repeatedly brought home that the National Socialists threatened the future of Europe and should be taken seriously. As Toler notes:

[O]n August 31, 1930, with the elections for the new Reichstag only two weeks away, Schultz analyzed the position of the seventeen parties then on the German ballot in a long article in the Tribune. She told her readers bluntly that the outcome of the election was important to the entire world. … she made clear what Hitler and his followers wanted and how dangerous they were. The Fascists wanted to overthrow the government and establish a dictatorship of ‘truly Germanic men,’ she wrote. They openly threatened pogroms against Jews and ‘other alien elements in Germany.’  They had proved over and over that they were willing to club down political opponents when they couldn’t argue them into submission.

Despite Schultz’s reporting, even astute political observers in 1930 failed to take the Nazis seriously. Schultz knew better. The number of stories Schultz filed about the actions of Hitler and his followers increased in frequency throughout 1931. She continued to explain the larger social and political context when writing about Depression-era Germany and described the Nazis as a growing political force. She introduced readers to Hitler’s Brownshirts, and as early as November 1931, reported on Hitler’s “terror plan” to force Jews out of Germany.

For the next two years, Schultz reported on every stage of Hitler’s campaign, including political and physical attacks on Hitler’s opponents. As Toler described, “over and over, she hammered home her belief that” the increasing acceptance of Hitler and the Fascists “was a matter of life and death for the Weimar Republic.” Anyone who read Schultz’s articles knew not to underestimate Hitler’s growing power.

After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Schultz reported on Hitler’s abuses of power, how he removed his political opponents from all levels of government, banned opposition parties, dismantled labor unions, and arrested thousands of members of the Communist Party. Within his first year, Hitler and the Nazis destroyed the political landscape of Germany and tore the society apart. In one of the earliest references in an American newspaper to German concentration camps, Schultz wrote in March 1933 about the government’s plans to detain 5,000 Communists at Dachau.

From 1933 to 1940, Schultz wrote hundreds of articles exposing the enactment of antisemitic laws and growing violence against Germany’s Jewish population, and she openly reported on the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of Jews. She warned of Germany’s efforts to re-arm and return as a military power, wrote of government attacks on Christian churches, and exposed the Nazis’ eugenics-based policies designed to strengthen the German “gene pool.”

During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Schultz witnessed the temporary cover-up of this reality by removal of “Jews Not Welcome” signs from restaurants, hotels, and other public places. She observed the government transform Berlin into a theme-park version of itself. Schultz was dismayed by American visitors who arrived for the Olympics impressed by the false perception of Germany the Nazis had created for them, and who left skeptical of newspaper reporters who told a different story.

When the Olympics ended and the tourists returned home, Schultz reported that the antisemitic signs reappeared and the persecution of Jews and political dissidents resumed with increased intensity. In a Tribune article on September 11, 1936, Schultz described a speech by Joseph Goebbels as one of the “fiercest anti-Jewish proclamations yet delivered in the Nazi drive against Jews.”

By this time, reporting the truth from Berlin was becoming increasingly dangerous. Germany had become a surveillance state, and German laws suppressing the freedom of the press made it unlawful to report negatively on the Reich. Although Schultz and the Tribune took precautions, behind every story was the threat of deportation, arrest, or the concentration camps.

To protect Schultz from retaliation, she and the Tribune used the pseudonym John Dickson with datelines in Copenhagen and Paris for her most hard-hitting articles. Writing under the Dickson byline, Schultz told readers about Hitler’s murder campaigns against political rivals, filed investigative reports on the existence of concentration camps and growing persecution of Germany’s Jews, provided an inside look at the Hitler Youth movement, and described how the Nazis kept a card index on every German citizen.

On the night of November 9-10, 1938, violent attacks against Jews erupted across Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. Rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. Members of Hitler Youth smashed the windows and looted thousands of Jewish-owned stores, and the Gestapo arrested 30,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. As Schultz informed her readers, it was the largest antisemitic attack in Berlin history. For several days, Schultz reported the full extent of violence and arrests.

After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and with the outbreak of World War II, reporting from Berlin became increasingly difficult. By the end of 1940, it was clear Schultz needed to leave Germany, which she did in January 1941. She did not return until April 1945, when General Patton’s troops liberated the death camp near Buchenwald. The Tribune sent Schultz and a photographer to cover it. As described by Toler, Schultz was “greeted by soldiers with horror-stricken faces, who had marched into Buchenwald only hours before.” She was given “an unfiltered view of the camp’s atrocities. … Soldiers showed the reporters the gallows hooks on which dying prisoners hung for hours and the elevator on which their bodies were transported to the rows of incinerator ovens.”

Because of Schultz’s multi-lingual fluency, she experienced Buchenwald on a more personal level as she interviewed many of the former prisoners in French and German. In one touching scene, a group of liberated Norwegian Jews were delighted when they learned Schultz could also speak their language. Schultz learned that they were part of a group of eight hundred Norwegian Jews forced to march to Buchenwald as the Russians drew near. Only the five of them survived. 

When Schultz sought to interview some French prisoners at the hospital in Buchenwald, she observed the most gruesome images she had ever seen.

Three tiers of bunks held dying men. … There was nothing she could do to make them more comfortable. All she could do was call out to them over and over again in French, “You are free.” After a while, she added, “I have just come from Paris. The chestnuts are in bloom in Paris.”

One man sat halfway up and reached a hand toward her. She went over and took it.

“Is it really true?” he asked.

“It’s really true. You are free. American planes are coming.”

“The chestnuts are in bloom?”

She nodded. And then he was gone.

Following the war, Schultz covered the Bergen-Belsen trials at Luneburg, which preceded the Nuremberg trials. A British military tribunal had charged forty-five Germans who worked at the Auschwitz and Belsen camps with war crimes. Schultz reported on witness testimony describing mass deaths at Belsen, the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the cruelty inflicted on prisoners by the prison staff. The international news coverage of the trials gave the world its first extensive look at the savagery of the death camps.

Ultimately, Schultz’s life in journalism faded into oblivion. Although one of the most knowledgeable and fearless reporters to have honestly chronicled the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany during the 1930s, she never won the Pulitzer Prize or any major awards for her writing, was never recognized as a major media figure, and is little remembered by the news consuming public.

Yet, the life and career of Sigrid Schultz is a testament to the power of good reporting to uncover the best and worst in society. She exposed the unvarnished truth about what was happening in Germany in the years leading up to war, and she helped her readers understand the context and development of history as it occurred. It was not always glamorous work, and she received little credit or recognition. But for more than twenty years she used her command of languages, her sources, and her knowledge of German society to warn the world about the rising threat of fascism in Europe.

With authoritarianism once again on the rise at home and abroad, the search for truth and the importance of ethical, reality-based journalism that holds power to account is as important as it was in Sigrid Schultz’s time. When leaders of nations threaten reporters with treason, call them “enemies of the people” and cry “fake news” whenever a journalist reports a story that reflects negatively on them, the foundations of democracy and freedom are degraded and weakened. Only through the dedication and commitment of hard-working journalists like Sigrid Schultz, who carefully cultivate sources, fact-check and verify, and persevere in the face of threats, intimidation, war zones, lies and deceptions, can news organizations bring us a “first rough draft of history” that informs, educates, and helps us understand today what the world will look like tomorrow.

Politics with a Moral Conscience

Texas State Rep. James Talarico on the Ezra Klein Show

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred… but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another. – Robert F. Kennedy

In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House, 2018), the historian and writer Jon Meacham argued that the history of America is an ongoing conflict between the worst and best impulses of its leaders, between those who appeal to fear, racism, and intolerance, and those who appeal to hope, progress, and inclusion. At their best, our leaders rise above partisan division and inspire the "better angels" of our character. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery and provided moral clarity to the country in the darkest period of American history. Leo Tolstoy said of Lincoln, “His greatness consisted in the integrity of his character and the moral fiber of his being.” It is a good standard by which to judge our leaders.

The lack of moral leadership in the United States today is heartbreaking. With Donald Trump as president and the world turned upside down, people are desperate for leaders with character and integrity who can provide moral guidance and lead by example. Great leaders, said the late Jewish theologian Jonathan Sacks, “make people better, kinder, nobler than they would otherwise be.” Indeed, the most influential voices in American history, from Thomas Paine and the nation’s founders to Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Reinhold Neibuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, and Robert Kennedy, inspired the nation’s spiritual and civic life by appealing to our moral conscience and better selves.

I was heartened by a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, which introduced a refreshingly new and original voice in American politics. His name is James Talarico, a 36-year-old Democratic state representative from Texas who is running for U.S. Senate. Talarico is an unusual politician in part because he is a progressive Democrat who speaks openly about his faith and the need for moral principles to guide public policy. He has served in the Texas State House of Representatives since 2018, and is currently a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, a theologically liberal seminary within the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.

Guided by his faith and theology, Talarico is intelligent, thoughtful, and not afraid to use moral language to convey his care for humanity on matters of public policy. His moral conscience stands in sharp contrast to a presidential administration and political culture that thrives on incredible cruelty. Despite his liberal politics, he appeals to a broadly diverse segment of the population because he listens and speaks to humanity’s need for connectedness, kindness, and what he calls a “politics of love.”

“I believe love is a force as real as gravity,” he said during a lengthy interview on Klein’s podcast last week. “Love to me is the most powerful thing in the universe. It is not weak, it is not neutral, it is not passive. It doesn’t paper over disagreement.”

As a lifelong Democrat, I become dispirited at times by the skepticism and hostility that many liberals and progressive manifest towards people of faith. And yet, I understand and share in this skepticism when the loudest and most dominant religious voices support policies that are incredibly cruel, inhumane, and antithetical to the very religion—Christianity—those voices so loudly and self-righteously proclaim. Indeed, it is impossible to reconcile the intolerance and callousness of the Christian Right with the “God is love” and “love thy neighbor” principles that formed the foundation of my faith growing up. The false piety espoused by many self-proclaimed Christians, lately amplified within the Republican Party and Trump administration, betray a fundamental lack of understanding of their alleged faith.

Armed with a formal theological education, Talarico forcefully challenges how conservative Christians interpret and apply their faith in the political sphere. He refers to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 25, where Jesus commands his followers to treat "the least of these" among us--the poor, suffering, and marginalized--with compassion; and to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and welcome the stranger, as “Christianity 101”. Talarico contends that, in these passages are the two most essential commandments of Jesus – to “love God” and to “love our neighbors.” For Talarico, “loving God” drives his faith, while “loving our neighbors” drives his politics.

Talarico’s voice is a refreshing change at a time when religion is repeatedly perverted and corrupted by politicians who falsely proclaim the United States a Christian nation while espousing values that grossly distort and dismiss the central tenets of Jesus' teachings. These same politicians routinely oppose health care for the sick, food assistance for the hungry, and a living wage for the poor. As Talarico explains, the religious right wants “to base our laws on the Bible until they read the words of Jesus: Welcome the stranger, liberate the oppressed, put away your sword, … and give the money to the poor.”

For the past fifty years, says Talarico, the religious right has convinced its followers that abortion and same-sex relationships were the two most critical issues with which they should be concerned. “It’s remarkable to me that you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues that Jesus never talked about.” That they then ignore Jesus’ commands to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and welcome the stranger “is just mind-blowing.” Economic justice is mentioned thousands of times in both the New Testament and Hebrew Scriptures and “is such a core part of our tradition, [but] it’s nowhere to be seen in Christian nationalism or on the religious right.”

A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree in education from Harvard University, Talarico formerly taught public middle school in one of his state’s poorest districts. Since becoming a member of the Texas State House, Talarico sponsored and helped enact legislation to allow incarcerated minors to earn a high school diploma, cap pre-K class sizes, and implement sweeping improvements to early childhood education. He also championed bipartisan legislation that limited the out-of-pocket costs for insulin to $25 a month. In 2021, Texas Monthly magazine picked him as one of the top ten legislators in the state. His more recent legislative initiatives included supporting a $15,000 pay raise for public school teachers, closing the remaining child prisons in Texas, allowing Texans to buy their prescription drugs cheaper in Canada, prohibiting surprise ambulance billing, and providing tax relief to childcare centers.

Talarico is a pro-choice Democrat who firmly defends the separation of church and state and believes deeply in religious pluralism. In 2023, he fought a Republican-sponsored law to post the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom. “This bill is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it is deeply un-Christian,” he said in the Texas Capitol. As he told Klein:

I’ve often wondered, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don’t they post “Money is the root of all evil” in every boardroom? Why don’t they post “Do not judge” in every courtroom? Why don’t they post “Turn the other cheek” in the halls of the Pentagon? Or “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven” on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?

The genius of Christianity, observes Talarico, is that God was revealed in Jesus, a “humble, compassionate, barefoot rabbi in the first century, someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority.”

Talarico understands that Christianity at its core is a radical religion, a countercultural force that challenges the established order. But the religion has been coopted by those who would justify a politics that glorifies military power, seeks domination over nations and people perceived to be weaker than us, vilifies immigrants, and shows a fundamental lack of caring and compassion for humanity. “Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process,” says Talarico. “[T]hey’re using my tradition — they’re speaking for me — and so I think I have a special moral responsibility to combat Christian nationalism wherever I see it.”

One need only look at the Trump administration’s brutally harsh and inhumane immigration policies that are ruthlessly implemented by ICE and Border Patrol agents against people who have come here to escape violence or to better their family’s life. For Talarico, you simply cannot claim allegiance to Christian principles and then justify treating other human beings with the unmitigated cruelty demonstrated by Trump’s policies. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant,” says Talarico. “You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God.”

Can a liberal Democratic politician who speaks so openly about faith and spirituality, and who practices a “politics of love” succeed in 2026? The answer may be different in a state like Texas than it is in the coastal states. But there is a refreshing authenticity in Talarico’s approach that reflects the centrality of faith in his life. “I’m honest about that,” he says, “even when it bothers people in my own party, which it does a lot. … But it is who I am. I can’t be anybody else. And so, I think showing up as the person you are and then saying something real, saying something honest about the world — that is refreshing to people in this moment.”

He may be onto something. In 2018, Talarico won in a district that voted for Donald Trump two years earlier and which no one in the Democratic Party thought was winnable. And in 2022, the same year Greg Abbott, the right-wing Republican governor of Texas, won his third term, Talarico won the district with 77% of the vote. In 2024, Talarico won again, this time with no opposition. Talarico contends that his success is due in part to his willingness to listen to people on both sides, to build relationships and establish trust, even “with people who aren’t with us yet.” As he told Klein, “We have a moral imperative to win in a democracy. Because if you don’t win, you don’t get power. And if you don’t get power, you can’t make people’s lives better.”

People want to be inspired. And when someone comes along who can move and inspire people in positive ways, it is worth noting. Especially in the Age of Trump, which thrives on appeals to fear, hate, and anger to move society backwards. To move people forward, to help society advance to a better, more inclusive place, you need someone who can motivate, excite, and cultivate hope. In my lifetime, Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama were the most effective at appealing to aspirational ideals of the American spirit while attempting to inspire hope for the future. Although they differed in ideology, their ability to inspire the American people allowed them to win decisive elections.

“If we are going to defeat Trumpism,” insists Talarico, “it’s going to require putting forward a new vision of what a different kind of politics would look like.” Ever the theologian, Talarico suggested to Klein: “If we actually treated all of our neighbors as bearers of the image of the divine, how would our discourse look? How would our public policies look? To me, that is the primary question that we should all be asking.” Talarico’s question reflects the kind of politics we currently lack, and the kind people are searching for.

I do not know if Talarico will be successful in his run for U.S. Senate. He may be a long shot. But he represents something we desperately need in today’s political environment. “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” King’s words should serve as a powerful reminder that the “politics of love” can defeat the politics of hate, fear, and division. It is something all of us know at our core, and perhaps James Talarico can help us enable it.

The Trump Doctrine: We Can Take Anything We Want

(Attribution: Times of India)

Call it gunboat diplomacy. Call it imperialism. Call it bullying a weaker country within our “sphere of influence.” All are accurate descriptions of what occurred on January 3, 2026, when U.S. military forces attacked Venezuela in Caracas, bombed buildings (including at least one apartment building), killed dozens of Venezuelan security forces and civilians, and seized Nicolas Maduro and his wife, who were flown to the United States to face alleged drug trafficking charges.

Many Venezuelans are understandably happy to see Maduro removed. He was a thug, a corrupt despot who ruled through repression, and a man who, along with Hugo Chavez before him, destroyed the Venezuelan economy and caused nearly one-fourth of the country’s citizens to flee their homeland. But the ends do not justify the means.

First, the attack on Venezuela violated international law. It was an illegal and unilateral military action against a nation with which we were not at war, and which had not attacked us. We conducted the attack without international consultation or support in violation of the rules-based international order established by the United States and Europe after World War II. The United Nations Charter, of which the United States was a key architect, provides that no country may invade or attack another country unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council or when acting in self-defense. This has been a bedrock principle of international law for the past 80 years.

As Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and president-elect of the American Society of International Law, told The New Yorker, “[if] a President can just decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and presumably put someone in power who is favored by the Administration … that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force.” 

Although the Trump administration has suggested that the United States must defend itself against drug smugglers, any claim of self-defense is ludicrous. As the former national director of the ACLU and Columbia law professor David Cole explained in The New York Review of Books, “self-defense applies only in response to an actual or imminent armed attack, and whatever else drug smuggling might be, it is not even conceivably an armed attack.” Venezuela was not at war with the United States and, whatever the evidence may show with respect to Maduro’s complicity in smuggling cocaine (which in the case of Venezuela is mostly destined for Europe), neither Maduro nor the alleged drug smugglers ever engaged in armed attacks against the United States. As Cole rightly notes, “The only nation with a self-defense justification here is Venezuela.”

Second, the U.S. military action violated U.S. law. The U.S. Constitution explicitly reserves to Congress the right to declare war or authorize military force, and the War Powers Act requires the president to notify Congress before engaging U.S. troops in military action. Trump boasted at the press conference following the attack that he neither sought congressional approval nor consulted in advance with any members of Congress or the intelligence committees (though he shockingly said the next day that he consulted with oil company executives in advance of the attack). Although this is not the first time a U.S. president has ordered military action without full congressional authorization, Trump’s actions here, taken without any congressional consultation, were brazenly unconstitutional. These are the actions of an oligarchy, not a democratic republic.

Nor was the attack on Venezuela, as claimed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a “law enforcement operation” to arrest Maduro and his wife on the pending drug charges. Invading a country to seize and remove their leader is an act of war, not law enforcement. Imagine if the United Kingdom charged Trump with a financial crime and then sent its special forces with air cover to enter the White House, arrest Trump, and forcibly remove him from the country. Would anyone consider that a “law enforcement operation”? In any event, Trump demolished Rubio’s explanation when he stated that the United States intended to “run the country” indefinitely “until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” That sounds to all the world like regime change, not law enforcement.

Was our illegal military action at least motivated by noble ideals, like restoring democracy to Venezuela? Unfortunately, of the conflicting justifications provided by the administration for attacking Venezuela, restoring democracy was not one of them. Trump dismissed outright any thought of transitioning Venezuela’s presidency to the popular opposition leader, Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who Trump falsely claimed did not have the support of the country (her party won the 2024 election illegally suppressed by Maduro). He instead chose to leave the remaining members of Maduro’s regime in power if they are willing to “play ball” with the administration.

Of course, what the administration means by “play ball” is allowing the United States and its large multinational corporations to reassert control of Venezuelan oil reserves, which Trump contends the Venezuelan government “stole” from the United States decades ago when Venezuela nationalized its oil industry. And, Trump exclaimed, “we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” cementing his overt imperialistic ambitions.

Thus, Trump’s goal in capturing Maduro was entirely about “getting back” the oil, and he ordered U.S. military action for the benefit of fossil fuel executives and an industry that donated heavily to Trump during past elections. By doing so, Trump falsely conflated U.S. national interests with the private interests of a few select corporations, whose primary objectives are to maximize profits for their wealthy shareholders.

Trump does not pretend that he wants to make the world a better place, or improve our alliances, or protect the stability of international law. He simply wants to assert his power, show how tough and strong he is, and enrich U.S. billionaires and companies. He holds our European alliances in disdain. He despises democracy and praises autocracy. It is why he has always respected and admired people like Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Mohammed bin Salman, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping. He envies the power wielded by dictators, rejects international law, and refuses to follow the rules and diplomatic norms that might impede his ability to do whatever he wants.

As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN on January 5, “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” According to Miller (and Trump), international law and treaties that protect the sovereignty and independence of the world’s recognized nations are merely “international niceties” that mean nothing in the “real world.” To Trump and Miller, the rule of law be damned. “The United States is using its military to assert our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere,” said Miller. “We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. … The future of the free world depends on America being able to assert ourselves, our interests, without apology.”

I cannot imagine that any person of intelligence takes Stephen Miller seriously, but he is a powerful behind-the-scenes official in the Trump administration with a significant say over U.S. policy. And Miller, like Trump, believes firmly in a world in which the United States can overthrow governments with impunity and take control of another nation’s resources so long as it advances what Trump subjectively believes is in America’s national interest.

At the January 3 press conference, Trump invoked the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which as modified by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, proclaimed U.S. supremacy in the Western Hemisphere and the right of the United States to militarily intervene into Latin American affairs to ensure stability and maintain regional dominance. In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt effectively replaced the Monroe Doctrine with the Good Neighbor Policy, which stressed non-intervention, mutual respect, and collaboration with Latin American nations on hemispheric security. The United States in 1948 also co-founded the Organization of American States, which emphasized shared security and respect for sovereignty among the nations of North and South America. This approach was consistent with the post-World War II system of international law designed to prevent countries from disrespecting the sovereignty of their neighbors and unilaterally solving conflicts through war.

Welcome to the Trump Doctrine, which ignores international law and the post-war system of restraints and alliances, and says to the world that we will do what we want, when we want, and unless you are powerful enough to stop us, there is nothing you can do about it. Or, to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “F--- around and find out” – the FAFO doctrine.

If you think this is hyperbole, think again. Shortly after attacking Venezuela, Trump warned Colombia’s president to “watch his ass,” said “we’re going to have to do something in Mexico,” and Cuba “is ready to fall.” Marco Rubio, who has long called for regime change in Cuba, said, “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I'd be concerned - at least a little bit.” When asked by Jake Tapper to rule out U.S. military force against Greenland, Stephen Miller responded, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” Trump has double- and triple-downed on these statements over the past few days.

Russia and China are paying close attention. The idea that the world is a place that powerful countries can carve up to suit their interests fits directly into their worldviews. Countries within their respective spheres of influence, including Ukraine and Taiwan, are feeling especially uneasy today. The United States will have little ground to stand on when our adversaries inevitably flex their muscles to invade or dominate nearby, weaker nations.

Trump does not read much, and he knows almost nothing about history. But the world was a more dangerous and bleaker place when strong countries were able to dominate and exploit weaker countries at will. Following the bloodbath of World War I, the death of sixty million people in World War II, and the advent of nuclear weapons, the nations of the world finally agreed that we needed a rules-based international order to lessen the likelihood of another world war and the possible destruction of the planet. The United Nations and other institutions of international diplomacy have not always succeeded in preventing wars and foreign conflicts, but they have been crucial to preventing another catastrophic world war.

The one thing on which I agreed with Trump all these years was his recognition that the U.S. war and subsequent occupation of Iraq during the first decade of the 21st century was a complete and utter disaster. Not having a plan for the day after, for Page Two of what at first appears to be a successful military operation, automatically turns success into failure. Trump offered no plan for Venezuela beyond our taking over its oil reserves. I hope for the sake of the Venezuelan people that the country will soon transition into a vibrant democracy that can protect human rights and rebuild what was once a robust economy. But I am afraid the odds are steep. Chaos and instability, civil strife, and further repression are the more likely outcomes, and even oil companies will have little appetite to invest in such an environment.

The president’s lawless and brazen decision to go-it-alone in Venezuela, and his mafia-like threats against other nations of the region, including our friends and allies, is a return to the gun boat diplomacy of the Gilded Age, when the strong ruled the weak. Trump loves to assert and project power, and there is no easier way to do so than by waging imperial wars. Unless Congress and the American people reestablish the balance of power and reign in Trump’s lawlessness, international diplomacy and the rule of law will irreparably suffer, powerful oligarchs will rule the world within their “spheres of influence,” and the world will be a darker, more dangerous place.