Neal Pollack

“I didn’t ask hard questions because I knew I wouldn’t get an honest answer,” said Tucker Carlson, our edgelord Barbara Walters, in the hype-video run-up to his dull interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. But he didn’t get any honest answers in the interview anyway, so why bother asking in the first place? Carlson doesn’t seem to grasp that America’s geopolitical opponents grant him special access precisely because he won’t ask the hard questions. Carlson’s interviews are valuable because they give us a glimpse into what it would be like if we had an actual state-run media. Our journalism has its ideological biases.

While celebrating his signature legislative achievement, President Trump managed to wade into another ridiculous controversy this holiday weekend. In a Thursday night speech touting the benefits of the Big Beautiful Bill for family farmers, he said: “No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases, shylocks and bad people,” Trump said. “They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.” “Shylock”, of course, refers to the Jewish character from The Merchant of Venice, who demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt.

As President Donald J. Trump waits for One Big Beautiful Bill to sign on the 4th of July, it’s worth taking some Independence Day time to muse on what he means for The United States, other than making it some really big deals. The best deals, really. It’s what he does. Trump’s detractors call him Cheeto Hitler, the modern face of fascist authoritarianism. He is not that. His most fervent supporters see him as the savior returned to Earth in a golf shirt. He’s definitely not that. Besides, Führer or God isn’t a very American dichotomy. There’s another way, an American way, a very Trumpian way. America, at its core, is a con, a hustle, a 250-year real-estate boodle.

The Trump administration's dream of reopening Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay appears to have stalled. But more than 3,000 miles away, the state of Florida and Governor Ron DeSantis are making that dream come true anyway. Scheduled to open as soon as July 1, Florida is building “Alligator Alcatraz,” a 1,000-bed temporary migrant detention center on an unused airstrip deep in the Big Cypress National Preserve, part of the Everglades region. They’re naming it after Alcatraz because, according to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, “There’s not much waiting for [detainees] other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” Calling it “Climbing Fern Gitmo” or “Everglades Abu-Ghraib,” while also catchy, wouldn’t play.

With Iran’s nuclear sites “obliterated” and the 12 DAY WAR in the rear-view, the Trump administration can now turn attention back to its core mission: defeating the Enemy Within. Buried within all the war and New York election hubbub this week was the news that the US had arrested 11 Iranian nationals who were in the country illegally, including, according to the New York Post, “a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member with suspected ties to Hezbollah, an ex Iranian army sniper and a terror watchlist suspect.” The administration, not without reason, is concerned that Iran will activate “sleeper cells” in the US.

President Trump appeared in the long hallway Saturday night, flanked by his Three Sons – J.D., Pete and Little Marco – to let us know he’d done the big violence in Iran. It was a somber moment, a war moment, though, as Trump said on Truth Social after he’d ordered the dropping of the Mother of All Bombs deep into the heart of old Persia, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.”   Terry Southern, the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove, couldn’t have dreamed up a line so darkly ironic, but Trump gifts us with daily comic diamonds, intentional and unintentional. Saturday’s crown jewel came at the conclusion of his statement, the time usually reserved for “God Bless America.

Only certain days qualify as the greatest days in American history: July 4, 1776 will always lead the way, as will the day the Constitution was ratified. So will the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, VE Day, the moon landing and a small handful of others.  Yesterday, June 5, 2025, will join that select company, because yesterday was the day that the world’s richest man, on a media platform that he owns, accused the President of the United States of Jeffrey Epstein kinds of behavior. As I looked at my phone blowing up, I realized that America was never going to be the same. Elon Musk, as we all watched in real time over the last few months, made one of history’s most tragic miscalculations.

The ongoing (unsuccessful) attempt to persuade the world that Joe Biden is something more than a marginally-sentient head of cauliflower continued on Thursday, as Biden appeared with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, on The View. The money moment arrived when co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked Biden about the spate of books, “deeply sourced from Democratic sources, that claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities.” Biden stared downward, with an angry smirk. “What is your response to these allegations?” Griffin asked, “Are these sources wrong?” “Are wrong,” Biden gurgled, even though they were obviously not wrong. “Nothing to sustain that. Think of what we left with.

The Real ID moment is here, the Y2K panic of 2025. Today is the deadline to update your driver’s license, leading to frantic predictions of something no one alive has ever seen before – long lines at the DMV. Will the center hold, or will the need to have a digitally embossed star on a piece of plastic finally bring the Republic down once and for all? I predict a quiet day. The fact is, though you now need a Real ID, you technically don’t need one today, unless you do. People must now deploy these enhanced IDs any time they’re entering a federal building, which most people don’t do on the reg, or a nuclear-power plant, which most people never do, and, most significantly in the lives of the general public, if they’re trying to get through airport security.

Among the Sunday night demands from King Donald came this bizarre proclamation: “REBUILD AND REOPEN ALCATRAZ!” The latest Trumpian nocturnal emission evoked a time when America was a more “serious Nation…No longer will we tolerate these serious offenders who spread filth, blood, and mayhem on our streets.” Apparently, to return to law and order, all we need to do is restore the glory days of The Rock, which has been closed for 60 years and is currently a museum operated by the National Park Service. To be charitable, our prison system is cruelly overcrowded, and under Trump’s rule, it is fixing to be even more so. We’re going to need facilities to house “America’s most ruthless and violent offenders,” and Arkham Asylum only exists in the imagination.