When a marriage is in crisis, a point often occurs when constant bickering, arguing and fighting yields to detachment and hopelessness. The yelling stops. It’s quiet.

But it’s not peace. Exhausted, dispirited and contemptuous, one or both partners give up trying to convince the other that they’re wrong or ought to change. They accept that improvement is highly unlikely and check out emotionally.

Some psychologists call this uneasy calm a “silent divorce.” Dr. Ridha Rouabhia describes a silent divorce as “a state of being legally married but emotionally disconnected from one another, thus carrying within it a relational breakdown that is very often imperceptible but deeply damaging.” By the time you and your spouse are fighting your own personal cold war, odds of divorce are high.

Couples who fall in love and dedicate themselves to long-term committed relationships tend to fit into one of two categories. There are the soulmates who share important values and personality traits. Then there are the complementary types, aka “opposites attract,” where -hopefully — one partner’s strengths make up for the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.

Complementary couples can have successful marriages. But these relationships work only if each partner appreciates their partner’s contributions and is cognizant as well as grateful that their own failings are generously overlooked. As time builds familiarity and familiarity breeds contempt over the course of a lifetime, that can be challenging.

Years ago, I was close to a classic complementary couple. The wife, whom I met in college, was married to a man 10 years older than her. A tight-cropped salt-and-brunette WASP from the Midwest, he was politically and temperamentally conservative, preppy and stuffy. A fluffy-blonde converted Buddhist from the West Coast, she leaned left and was loud, bubbly and unfiltered. Everyone who met them instantly understood their mutual attraction. Wild, sexual and adventurous, my friend dragged her uptight husband out of his shell. She made his life fun and interesting. Organized and always planning for contingencies, he bailed her out and cleaned up her frequent messes. He made her feel safe. They were a cute couple.

Over the years, the mutual gratitude that drove my friends’ Lucy-and-Ricardo marriage ceded territory to sneering contempt. She got tired, then angry, at always having to initiate sex. He grew weary of the drama from her never-ending series of crises. They fought. Then they didn’t. They had fought to a stalemate.

Their “silent divorce” lasted a few years before giving way to the real thing.

Everyone thought it was a shame.

They needed one another.

The American political union between partisans of the two major parties is a complementary marriage. Though frequently fractious, for much of the 20th century there was a tacit understanding between Democrats and Republicans that each brought something to the union, to the country, that the other needed even if they weren’t good at verbalizing their appreciation.

Like my friend’s husband, Republicans were America’s stolid, responsible, national caretakers. Based in the countryside (and, until recently, in the boardroom), they were boring and hated the hippies and their rock ‘n’ roll and never would have supported civil rights and other liberation movements had they not been forced upon them. But conservatives also provided and protected virtues like military strength, national pride and deficit hawkishness that, deep in their pot- and LSD-infused souls, liberals knew were essential to the republic.

And like the husband’s wild-and-loopy wife, Democrats were reckless tax-and-spenders who hung out on the coasts and in big cities and tried and failed at social engineering schemes like welfare and affirmative action, but some of those schemes, like Social Security and Medicaid, saved the country and drove almost all the progress that improved people’s lives and thus staved off revolution. Though they didn’t like to admit it, Republicans knew in their stock-portfolios-for-hearts that liberalism saved them from their rapacious selves and forced them to admit when their wars didn’t work out.

The national marriage started to unravel under Ronald Reagan, enjoyed a rapprochement under Bill Clinton and turned ugly under Barack Obama. As with any failed romance, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific moment that marked the beginning of the end. I’d pick 2010, when Mitch McConnell, then Senate minority leader, said that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” McConnell’s idea of trying to win back the White House wasn’t wild. His formulation, emboldened by the rise of the proto-MAGA Tea Party, was remarkably contemptuous. As an opposition party, the GOP was expected to articulate its own set of policies while paying lip service to its willingness to work with the president on issues where the two parties had common ground, rather than center its messaging around pigheaded obstructionism.

Republicans, having failed to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, doubled down in 2014 when McConnell pledged not only to block Democratic initiatives just because but to threaten to shut down the federal government every time the other party tried to push through a bill.

Now everything is going their way. White House, Congress, Supreme Court, Big Tech and a compliant news media — Donald Trump and the Republicans control it all. There was scarcely an echo of the riotous protests in response to Trump’s first inaugural in 2017 in the streets of Washington for the second one last week. Democratic leaders and their allies are despondent, disorganized and silent. “Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach,” reports The New York Times. Liberals are actively tuning out of politics, canceling their subscriptions and turning off MSNBC, televised organ of the Democratic National Committee.

After sounding DEFCON 4 at volume 11 every time Trump issued an obnoxious tweet during his first term, incessantly shrieking about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, unleashing ferocious partisan legal warfare against him and hysterically characterizing a Trumpian restoration as an existential threat to democracy that would bring about real and actual fascism, the post-electoral silence of the liberal lambs is deafening.

You may feel good about all this, if you’re a Republican.

Don’t. As the Tacitus quote currently circulating in response to Israel’s flattening of Gaza goes: “They make a desert and call it peace.” The sounds you’re not hearing — leftists marching and chanting down the block, liberals bleating in the comments section, Democratic politicians hollering about Trump’s unprecedented awfulness — is not acquiescence, much less acceptance. It is the disgust of silent divorce.

Democratic voters (of whom I am not one; I am to their left) have given up on the Republicans with whom they share a country. Democrats still live under the same roof as their Republican spouses — for the time being, there’s no way for them to move out — but their anger has devolved into a cold contempt from which there is rarely any way back. Those people – Republicans — can stay in their Electoral College-inflated flyover states and watch Fox and NASCAR and vote however they want, including against abortion, and we (the smart people) will keep to ourselves in our urban enclaves. They’re not worth yelling at.

They’re not even worth talking to.

This marriage is in trouble.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

There are two kinds of leaders: managers and revolutionists.

Most American presidents are managers. Managers have small ambitions, often so small as to be immeasurable. They may or not think the organization that they’re taking over requires a few nips or tucks, but they believe the fundamentals are sound. The main ambition of these incrementalists is to attain their position. The moment their buttocks sink into the big chair behind the big desk, they have fulfilled their biggest goal.

It is easy to identify a managerial president during a time of crisis. No matter how bad things get and how angry voters become, managers are loathe to change much. They govern as though continuity were a given.

Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, both consummate technocrats, assumed the nation’s highest office during periods of economic upheaval. Yet they did not follow the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a revolutionist, by introducing major plans or anti-poverty bills to try to alleviate inflation or high unemployment. George H.W. Bush, whose decades in Washington inclined him to even less ambition than outsiders like Carter and Obama, had no discernible plans for the country before moving into the White House in 1989 beyond, like Peter Sellers, just being there. We were mired in recession throughout his term, and he did nothing.

Whatever you think about him or his politics, give this to Donald Trump: He has launched his second term with the biggest intentionality of any president since Ronald Reagan. Clearly having learned from his experience following his first surprise win that political capital ebbs away after inauguration as quickly as a new car loses value, and possibly inspired by the historical benchmark of FDR’s first 100 days, Trump is coming out of the gate with grandiose gestures intended to signal great ambitions that deliver on his long list of dramatic campaign promises.

The crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border became a top issue for Trump in 2024. And so, within hours of his restoration, he declared an emergency that allowed him to send in military troops, shut down the app used by asylum applicants, declared drug cartels terrorists, tried to end birthright citizenship and, for good measure, demanded that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed. Much of these moves are objectively stupid — birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution, drug runners aren’t terrorists, the number of unauthorized border crossings fell precipitously after Biden basically closed it last summer, and let’s not even think about the “Gulf of America” — but you can’t say they’re the small-bore triangulation crap Bill Clinton picked up from Dick Morris, like lower prescription drug prices for seniors, lower student loan interest rates and kneecapping Sister Souljah. And mass deportations are still on the way. If you voted for Trump due to the border crisis, you’re happy.

Why do we have more managerial than revolutionary presidents? Revolution is hard.

We are barely days into Trump 2.0, yet the challenges are already starting to become apparent. The president’s attempt to McKinsey-ize the federal government into fiscal austerity, the non-actual-departmental Department of Government Efficiency, lost one of its touted pair of pet billionaires less than seven hours after the inauguration when Vivek Ramaswamy pulled out, supposedly to explore a quixotic run for Ohio governor.

Trump can’t help the fact that personnel are unpredictable. But he is responsible for a major oversight in whatever vision he may be pursuing: He has yet to articulate a unified theme for the sweeping changes he presumably intends. FDR did this with characteristic effectiveness in his 1933 inaugural address. Confronting high unemployment at the nadir of the Depression, he said: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.”

“This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously,” Roosevelt continued. “It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our national resources.” Much of what followed (the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority) fell into the justification for direct job creation by the federal government and helped sell it to the public and Congress.

To the extent that Trumpism is similar to 20th-century fascism, it’s that it’s an ideology devoid of internal consistency beyond its point of origin, Trump’s mouth. Under Nazi Germany’s “Fuhrer Principle,” Hitler not only enjoyed the full power of law by making an utterance but was considered to have created a cogent ideology simply because whatever he believed and ordered came from him. This was, of course, irrational to an extreme and internally inconsistent. For a time, under absolute totalitarian dictatorship, however, Hitler’s cult was sustainable.

Crippled and fake as our democracy is, Americans are still a harder sell than mid-century Germans. In the not so long run, whether Trump succeeds will depend on whether he is able to compose a credible and consistent narrative of what he’s attempting to achieve, as Reagan did when he downgraded the influence of liberalism within government and elevated the glories of individualism. Saying that everything you do puts America first simply because you said it — that won’t cut it.

After decades of managerial presidents who refused to engage with how angry and miserable most of us ordinary citizens have been, it will be interesting, and not a little frightening, to watch this would-be revolutionist.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

One of my editorial cartoonist colleagues got arrested for child pornography (or “child sexual abuse material,” as it is also called) this week. As I write this, he is in jail, apparently unable to make bail, awaiting arraignment.

I won’t get into the details of his case, or at least the details we have so far, here. It is, as these things go, a novel set of allegations. I may write about those aspects of the situation in the future.

He has had an exceptionally rewarding life and career. First Black cartoonist to win the Pulitzer in cartooning. Creator of a widely syndicated and highly respected comic strip. Author of a bestselling graphic novel. Husband and father of four.

All of that is starting to fall apart. His employers have issued statements distancing themselves from him even as they note that, legally at least, Americans are presumed innocent until proven guilty. It isn’t difficult to predict what will happen next. His life as he knew it before the police arrived at his home bearing a search warrant has come to an end. It is highly unlikely that he will ever be paid to draw cartoons again or, for that matter, do anything at all. At this point, his best-case scenario is that he doesn’t lose his family, makes bail so he can fight his case and is found not guilty or manages to negotiate a shorter-than-usual prison sentence.

Because you might wonder: We were not friends. Either of us could have called the other with reasonable certainty that the call would be returned. And we did. We talked about business stuff once or twice. We talked at a recent cartooning convention after he delivered a talk about his work.

He has not been charged with physically harming any children. In our culture, however, there is no worse offense to be accused of than anything that relates to pedophilia or child pornography. In prison, those convicted of “child molestation” are targeted for violence by inmates who have committed what they deem to be less serious offenses, like murder. He is in the worst kind of trouble.

It is completely understandable that we have contempt for those who violate and rape children, the most vulnerable members of society. Kids should be protected and cared for, not victimized. Survivors of childhood sexual (and other) trauma carry their wounds around with them the rest of their lives.

Reflecting our desire to protect children, lawmakers have instituted harsh penalties for those who are found guilty of crimes like those of which my colleague stands accused. For first offenders found guilty of CSAM possession, 99% go to prison; the average sentence is eight years. The House of Representatives is about to consider legislation, reportedly supported by President-elect Donald Trump, that would impose either the death penalty or a mandatory life sentence.

By all accounts, however, harsh sentencing is not having the desired deterrent effect. “Last year, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused — more than double what they found the previous year,” The New York Times reported in 2019. “Twenty years ago, the online images were a problem; 10 years ago, an epidemic. Now, the crisis is at a breaking point. … Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this.” CSAM had become even more widespread by 2023. AI “deep fake” CSAM, at least some of which is “trained” by scraping the real thing, has exploded all over the internet.

Perhaps it’s time to start thinking of men (who account for over 99% of those charged with possessing CSAM) who seek out this material not as monsters but as people desperately in need of help. As Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic, told the Times: “People don’t choose what arouses them — they discover it. No one grows up wanting to be a pedophile.”

We used to think victims of what we used to call child molestation tended to become molesters themselves. It happens, but not as much as experts formerly believed. Now the growing scientific consensus is that pedophiles are born that way. “The biological clues attached to pedophilia demonstrate that its roots are prenatal,” James Cantor, director of the Toronto Sexuality Center, said. “These are not genetic; they can be traced to specific periods of development in the womb.” It’s hard wiring. Unlike other people, many pedophiles’ sexual attraction to young people remains frozen in time from when they too are young, rather than aging along with them.

None of this is to imply that people who consume CSAM are not a threat to flesh-and-blood children. They are. Roughly half of prisoners convicted of CSAM eventually admit that they assaulted at least one kid. And the recidivism rate for sexual offenders is high.

Though it is tempting to say that dangerous people should be locked up or even killed, where is our compassion for the fact that they are themselves victims, of a psychological disorder? That they’re trying to fight off strong sexual urges that they never chose? That it’s almost impossible for them to get the help they need? State of mind of the accused is, or should be, front and center when evaluating whether someone has a criminal mindset and deserves imprisonment or suffers from a disorder that causes urges that could be effectively treated by psychotherapy and/or psychotropic and other drugs.

If you can’t summon sympathy, try focusing on the fact that our current approach is failing miserably.

One reason we’re losing the fight is because the problem is so vast. One out of six men told a 2023 Australian study that they were sexually attracted to children under age 18. Aside from CSAM, “mainstream” media, including advertising and social media, increasingly sexualizes children at ever-younger ages. For every guy like my colleague whose life we destroy and toss into prison at taxpayer expense, there are countless more to replace him and countless more disgusting images online and countless more young victims being exploited to provide them.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

The solidarity of American communities in the face of catastrophe, whether natural or manmade, is an aspect of our national character that most of us cherish. We never tire of stories about our fellow citizens upholding one another at the worst of times. We venerate the firefighters, emergency service workers, law enforcement officers and ordinary neighbors whose endurance and sacrifice hold communities together against cruel circumstance — without regard to race, creed, color, gender or partisan affiliation.

Or at least we did during much of our history. Yet as huge swaths of Los Angeles are consumed by wildfire, it is striking to see those traditional American values torched by a self-serving coterie of right-wing billionaires, whose loyalty to any principle beyond self-aggrandizement is nil: Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and of course their political avatar Donald Trump, the president-elect.

While the LA blaze rages on, all three of these men have used their gigantic public platforms to stoke a different but exceptionally destructive conflagration. Rather than encourage patriotic bonding and mutual aid, they broadcast messages of division, hatred and suspicion, served up in a poisonous stew of blatant lies, conspiracy theories and wretched nonsense.

Even as the Los Angeles Fire Department’s undaunted officers and leaders work around the clock, confronting danger and tragedy in every moment, loudmouths like Musk have the temerity to attack them, prattling on about “DEI,” the effort to mitigate decades of discrimination. Neither the Tesla mogul nor Murdoch’s blithering minions on the Fox News Channel — who are shocked that the LA fire chief is a lesbian — have produced a shred of evidence to show that diversity hinders firefighting. They never will. For the purposes of right-wing Republican propaganda, facts and logic are irrelevant and annoying.

In the same vein are Trump’s attacks on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he disparages with his usual gutter vernacular as “Newscum.” Posting ridiculous falsehoods about the state’s water supply, claiming the governor is withholding water from burning communities, can only be regarded as an obnoxious distraction while state officials try to save lives and stop the fire. With reservoir levels at or above capacity in most of the state, there is no shortage of water, but its use has been hampered by the hurricane-force winds and other more technical obstacles.

Instead of seeking ways to support the scorched and weary Angelenos, the Trump gang aims only to fabricate myths that will overshadow the real cause of this disaster. On CNN, GOP spokesman Scott Jennings has repeated a fake story about budget cuts to the LA Fire Department, when in fact the department received a $50 million increase last year. Donald Trump Jr. and various other clowns are whining over a tiny donation of equipment to Ukraine, which has no impact whatsoever.

They will literally say anything to avoid discussing the way climate change — the underlying cause of the hot, dry superstorm that turned a local fire into a regional inferno. They don’t believe in it, so it can’t be causing the fires. Except of course it is.

Trump’s impending return to power is awful to contemplate in these circumstances — especially for those in California who remember how he behaved the last time he occupied the Oval Office. He denies climate change and opposes any program to stem its deadly impact. And he has repeatedly manipulated federal aid to punish states he considered politically hostile to him, including during the 2018 wildfires in southern California.

As reported earlier this year by Politico, Trump refused to approve critical assistance for those communities until aides showed him that Orange County had given him more votes in 2016 than the entire state of Iowa. Obviously, that is not what presidential duty requires, as if that would matter to him.

The incoming president appears to have no compassion, no instinct to help those who have suffered horrendous losses. As usual, he is thinking about himself, his partisan objectives and his obsession with vengeance against perceived enemies.

The Trump years, which will soon be extended for another presidential term, have inflicted awful damage on American morale, empathy and unity. Restoring that spirit will take years and probably decades after he finally leaves. It doesn’t seem accidental that Murdoch and Musk, Trump’s gleeful enablers, are of foreign origin. Like him, they display no regard for American ethics and customs. And like him, they are making America not great but small, stupid and mean.

You can’t understand the presidency of James Earl Carter Jr. unless you contextualize it within the framework of the hysterical aftermath of the 1972 election. While the Republican Party brand suffered tremendous damage due to Watergate, Richard Nixon’s decision to prolong the Vietnam War and his resignation, the GOP proved improbably resilient. Despite a deep recession and an energy crisis, to say nothing of fallout from the Nixon pardon, Gerald Ford came within two points of defeating Carter a mere two years after Nixon resigned in disgrace; the decisive counterrevolutionary fervor of the Reagan Revolution followed four years after that.

With the spotlight on these earth-shattering events, it was easy to miss the civil war within the Democratic Party, between its liberal and centrist wings, that was prompted by the landslide defeat of George McGovern in 1972. (“Centrist” is used here for simplicity — that’s what they call themselves. By objective global standards, the centrist faction of the Democratic Party is corporatist and militarist, and therefore was and remains right-wing.)

In an exercise that would feel familiar to anyone observing the current struggle between progressive and corporate Democrats in the wake of the Kamala Harris debacle, party leaders and activists spent 1973 through 1976 blaming one another in ferocious fights over what went wrong and which wing of the party ought to be trusted to control the organization going forward.

Ultimately, centrists won the power struggle and sidelined the liberals. Though he entered the race as an outsider, Carter, then governor of Georgia, cemented the centrists’ victory and locked in the ideological template honed by another centrist Southern governor, Bill Clinton, and that still dominates today’s Democratic Party leadership. Old-fashioned liberals tried to stage a comeback under Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988; instead, their losses strengthened the centrists’ argument that Democrats needed to chase the Republicans as they migrated further right.

It is easy to see why many Americans put Carter in the liberal box. More than any other modern president, he talked about human rights in the context of U.S. foreign policy. He was the only president who didn’t wage any wars. His manner was affable and soft-spoken.

Whether or not they are ever successfully enacted, however, a president is defined by policies. Any objective analysis of his record must lead to a clear conclusion: Carter was a right-wing Democrat. And it mattered a lot. While his one term is typically dismissed by historians as lackluster or ineffectual, it had a dramatic impact on our politics.

Carter was our first post-liberal Democratic president. Half a century later, as Joe Biden packs his bags, the Carter model still holds. (Recognizing an ideological fellow, Biden was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter in 1976.) There is no sign that a traditional mid-20th-century-style liberal like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson or Adlai Stevenson, who championed the poor and working class and were generally skeptical of foreign military adventurism, will have a serious shot at capturing a Democratic presidential nomination any time soon.

Inheriting a wobbly economy from Ford, Carter decided to prioritize the fight against inflation over what a liberal would have cared about more: keeping as many Americans employed as possible. He appointed Nixon’s former undersecretary of the Treasury, Paul Volcker, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Volker hiked interest rates to 20%, triggering huge back-to-back recessions that lingered into the 1980s. A liberal president would have turned to Congress to try to mitigate the misery. But Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose a federal anti-poverty program.

Carter’s conservatism expressed itself most fully through his cynical Cold War foreign policy. Although most Democratic voters would have been enraged had they known at the time, discredited figures on the Republican right like David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were on speed dial in the Oval Office and frequently had the president’s ear whenever there was a crisis overseas. The most pernicious influence inside the administration was national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who fell to the right of Republicans when it came to the Soviet Union.

Carter’s team of foreign policy hawks convinced him to set aside his better judgment and reluctantly admit the dictatorial Shah of Iran to the United States to receive medical treatment, an unforced disaster that triggered the Iran hostage crisis and contributed to his defeat in 1980.

Never one to stay quiet despite repeatedly being proven wrong, Brzezinski notoriously pushed for Carter to fund and arm the radical Muslim Afghan mujahideen, many of whom eventually morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There is a strong chance that 9/11 would never have happened if not for Carter’s backing of jihadi fanatics. Does anyone doubt that the world would be better off today with an Afghanistan where women wore miniskirts, as they did under the Soviet-backed socialist secular government in the 1970s, rather than burqas?

Brzezinski argued that Afghanistan would become the USSR’s Vietnam, a quagmire that would destroy the country morally and economically. No one knows whether the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan had the desired effect. The world clearly became more dangerous after 1991, when the United States began to enjoy the lone superpower status that it exploited to run roughshod over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and countless other victims of American imperialism. Without its socialist Cold War adversary offering an alternative if flawed economic model, America’s capitalists declared themselves victors at the end of history, with no need to share profits with workers or exhibit deference to other nations.

Carter needlessly politicized the Olympics by boycotting the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. The following year, one of my college classmates was to have been on Team USA in fencing; I never forgave Carter for dashing her and her teammates’ hopes.

Carter is lionized as a pacifist. It wasn’t so when he was president. Most people think we have Reagan to thank for the out-of-control military spending that began with his massive U.S. defense buildup in the 1980s. But the current cult of militarism really started under Carter, a fact that Reagan himself later acknowledged.

Worst of all, Carter was a liar and a hypocrite. Even while he claimed to prioritize human rights, his White House propped up vicious dictatorships. “Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered,” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting’s Jeff Cohen recalled. “Elsewhere, despotic allies — from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran — received support from President Carter. In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala — again contrary to enduring myth — major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.”

Carter pardoned the Vietnam-era draft dodgers only to turn around and restore draft registration the very next year. If you are a male assigned at birth, you face five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and losing your college financial aid unless you register with the Selective Service System for the next military draft in America’s next unpopular war. That was Carter. And it wasn’t liberal.

Nor was he.