Suitable for this administration, and the MAGA crowd. (And the flat-earth crowd.)
The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri, 14 Feb 2026: Trump Administration Announces That We Don’t Know Where the Sun Goes at Night, subtitled “After deciding carbon dioxide does no harm, it was the logical next move.
A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don’t know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.
The National Institutes of Health has orders to devote every whiteboard in every conference room to this pressing question. In the Oval Office, under the gold leaf, the president and his advisers are making a big list of possibilities:
A dung beetle. Witches. Immigrants steal it. It’s in Greenland. “Maybe Mark Kelly and several other dissident members of Congress are hiding the sun in a big bag. (He got the bag when he was in space. Fortunately, soon only billionaires will be allowed to visit space and get the bags for the sun, and they will be required to give the bags to the president directly.)” And ending:
You can just decide that you don’t know things, it turns out, even if you do know them. You can simply decide to forget progress. Disease is caused by miasma, insufficient beef tallow, corn syrup, the evil eye. You can simply decide to burn coal and witches and books again.
Be especially sure to burn the books. We must do whatever we can to make light until the sun comes back.
Simple-minded MAGA thinking.
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On the one hand, legitimate statistics show that the world today as far better than it was centuries ago. On the other hand, Trump thinks the nation is in ruins, were it not for him. At the same time, most people are naturally pessimistic, thinking that the *past* was better than the present.
First, I’ll quote just one line from piece I’ll cover in more detail later:
It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory.
Then for today:
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 12 Feb 2026: This isn’t Trump’s “Golden Age” — it’s ours, subtitled “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, Americans are more pessimistic than ever. But there’s reason for hope”
Even for a president accustomed to making grandiose statements, this one was a whopper. On Wednesday, Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox Business that we are living in “the greatest period of anything we’ve ever seen.” That’s more than a bit vague, but I think we know what he meant.
Trump has always bragged incessantly about himself and his alleged accomplishments. But ever since he returned to the White House in 2025, he’s been touting his presidency as a “Golden Age,” even going so far as to make the expression tangible by slapping gilt on everything in sight. He genuinely believes he can change reality simply by relentlessly stating something as fact in the face of all evidence to the contrary. His repeated insistence, though, that the country has never been as successful as it is today has so far landed with a thud.
Once again, as I’ve noted, conservatives think you can change reality just by passing a law or stating what they wish to be true, over and over. They don’t do (perhaps do not understand) evidence.
We are, in fact, living in an historic time. Americans have rarely been more pessimistic about the future. According to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, Americans who believe they will have high-quality lives in five years declined to the lowest level since the organization began asking the question 20 years ago. Those who believe that both their current and future lives are good enough to be classified as “thriving” dropped to 48%. If this is America’s Golden Age, it doesn’t appear that people are seeing it.
Not historic because the world is better off — that too — but historic because people are pessimistic.
Then follow examples.
All this despondency appears to be having an effect on the GOP leadership. Trump and his acolytes have been sent into paroxysms of anger by the mild criticisms offered by American athletes at the Winter Olympics. When skier Hunter Hess had the temerity to say “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” the president called him a loser and said he shouldn’t have tried out for the team. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X, “Raise your hand if you think Olympic Skier Hunter Hess should be disqualified off the U.S. Team.” That idea got a ringing endorsement from Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who posted, “If you can’t stand up for your country while abroad—at the Olympics or otherwise Stay home.” Podcaster Megyn Kelly said that “Hess should be stripped of his ability to rep the USA & sent home.”
So much for free speech. They get more Orwellian by the day.
But that some Americans, like the Olympic team, do speak up is a sign of hope.
The sight of those Olympians feeling the need — and the freedom — to champion liberal values of diversity, kindness and compassion, as well as opposition to injustice, is a sign that all is not lost. And perhaps the best example of all came on Sunday when global superstar Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl halftime show and served up a roaring example of those values before over 128 million people all over the world. The joy expressed in his message of inclusion and universality said more about the America that most of its people actually believe in than any golden monuments to Trump will ever do.
The right’s cramped vision of American greatness, with its sour, white nationalist ideology and cruel authoritarian methods, is a good reason to be pessimistic. But the resilience of the American people from Minneapolis to Milan is telling a different story. For all of our gloom about the future, it appears we aren’t giving up. Perhaps the Golden Age really is upon us after all. It’s just not the one Donald Trump thinks it is.
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Meanwhile, as Trump’s approval ratings sink, Gallup will stop tracking those ratings. Coincidence?
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 14 Feb 2026: Trump gets help ignoring public opinion — voters should worry, subtitled “Gallup’s decision to stop tracking approval ratings could make it easier for Trump to shrug off public discontent”
On Wednesday, Gallup announced that after 88 years, it will no longer be tracking presidential approval ratings. The organization that began asking Americans a simple question in 1938 — ”Do you approve or disapprove today of Franklin Roosevelt’s job as President?” — now believes the very premise of the poll and the results it provided “no longer represent an area where Gallup can make its most distinctive contribution.”
A spokesperson for the organization characterized the decision as “part of a broader, ongoing effort to align all of Gallup’s public work with its mission” and denied that it came in response to pressure from the Trump administration. But the sudden change, coming at a time when reports have circulated about Donald Trump’s anger at his historically-low approval ratings, is suspect. In a recent video, Democratic strategist James Carville suggested that Gallup’s move was “a strategic decision.”
“I’m going to tell you right now, Gallup, I don’t believe you,” he said. “I believe you were pressured. I believe this story needs to be explored, because the surrender and capitulation we are seeing at a time of need for the United States is unbelievable.”
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More Philip Glass, from Akhnaten: Attack and Fall, from Act III. Almost as thrilling as that first movement of Satyagraha I posted earlier. 7:43 minutes long.
