Saturday Q&A

If you are still wrestling with the headline theme, some sauerkraut and pilsner might help.

Current Events

P.Y. in Watertown, MA, asks: You've written a lot about EpsteinPot Dome XYZ AffairGate, but, in the end, what does it matter? The only way I can see this making a difference is Republicans losing the midterms, which are a long time away. Trump is a known creep, a proud sex offender, a compulsive liar, a real piece of s*** of a human. He got elected twice on the basis of being a jerk and trolling the libtards reallll goooood. I think, in the end, he escapes everything, as only he can, because he's so brazenly and openly terrible that nothing can stick to him. I'm beginning to think that Teflon Don truly is polyfluoroalkylated.

(V) & (Z) answer: Richard Nixon was bulletproof... until he wasn't (Watergate). Ronald Reagan was bulletproof... until he wasn't (Iran-Contra). You can never be sure when something that blows up will stay blown up. And this has had more staying power, thus far, than any of the Trump scandals, except maybe 1/6.

Also, we write about what's going on in the world of politics. Not only is this the single-biggest story right now, but it's the backdrop for many other stories (e.g., the attempt to deflect attention to Barack Obama). Our specific focus is elections, and this could indeed influence the midterm elections. So, of course we have to write about it.

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J.W. in Los Angeles, CA, asks: I'm not particularly prone to conspiracy thinking, but that list of questions is compelling. And it made me wonder: with all the people who must have been connected to or who witnessed or cleaned up after the events around Epstein, how aren't there more eyewitness accounts? The central actor is dead, what is there to protect now?

(V) & (Z) answer: We would guess there are four types of people who have information about the Epstein situation: (1) Those who are dead, and cannot talk; (2) Those who perpetrated crimes, or who looked the other way while crimes were taking place, and who would do harm to themselves and their reputations by talking; (3) Those who have information, but are prohibited from releasing it due to the rules/ethics of their profession; and (4) Victims, who risk serious trauma if they speak out (think, for example, about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford).

The grand jury testimony would have plenty of eyewitness testimony, and yet nobody involved wants it released. The people pushing to keep the grand jury materials confidential are certainly not motivated by a desire to protect Epstein.

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S.R.S. in Marietta, GA, asks: You wrote about the news that DOJ has found an "angle" to go after Jack Smith on a Hatch Act violation.

I had thought that President Biden had issued a "preemptive" pardon to Smith (and others) as he departed the White House.

How does that pardon fit into this announcement?

(V) & (Z) answer: First, Biden did not pardon Smith. It's not clear why, but Smith might have declined, or Smith/Biden might have wanted Smith to be indicted, so he could backdoor some of the things he learned during his investigation. Second, presidential pardons extend to criminal matters only, and Hatch Act violations are a civil matter.

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M.S. in Houston, TX, asks: The U.S. doesn't really have nationally "listed" buildings protected by statute (the way the U.K. does), but I would have thought the White House was about the closest thing we have to that model. Looking back at the way additions to the building, both internal and external, have been treated in the past, I also thought Congress had passed laws requiring consultation with and planning by some body or expert. I'm old, so I sort of remember the major updating of the whole structure under Truman, not to mention Mrs. Kennedy's efforts to reform and historically correct the building's furnishings and decorations.

Trump's declaration that he's going to build a large, tasteless addition that will throw off the whole visual balance of the place, plus his earlier trampling of the Rose Garden, all on his own say-so, makes it sound like any president could do whatever he wanted to the White House, and there would be no way—legally—to stop him. I picture Trump deciding to just tear the whole place down and replace it with a golden palace to his own glory and calling it "Trump Tower D.C." Am I right about that? Especially since the current president cares nothing about the usual influence of tradition on presidential actions?

One thing the Orange Menace has accomplished has been to establish a list of all the things that the next Democratic trifecta will have to pass strict laws to prevent any future president from ever doing again.

(V) & (Z) answer: In general, the fact that Congress had to appropriate the money for renovations was seen as a completely sufficient check on presidents doing whatever they wanted to the White House and its grounds. Nobody anticipated a president who would find a way to raise nine figures on his own.

That said, the White House is a National Historic Landmark. It is also the property of the United States, and not of Trump. There are also many questions about exactly where this money is coming from. If he moves forward, there will be many lawsuits.

In addition, Congress would almost certainly have to give approval for major changes, even if the U.S. government is not footing the bill. There may be at least a few Republican members who don't want to deal with blowback from constituents over the White House being desecrated. And even if there are not, such a bill would be filibusterable.

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D.E. in Lancaster, PA, asks: Since you guys brought up Donald Trump's odd little constitutional on the roof of the White House earlier this week, anyone want to take a stab at the reason for his strange safari, complete with odd gestures? Location scout for the large, gold-plated Trump sign? Dreams of building a papal balcony so he can give his blessings to the faithful throngs below? I think we can safely rule out a sudden bout of remorse, leading to suicidal thoughts.

(V) & (Z) answer: He fancies himself a world-class real estate developer, and one thing real estate developers do is tour job sites. So, he presumably was looking over the site of the new ballroom with some of his people. Frankly, we are surprised he wasn't wearing a hard hat, since he was basically just cosplaying anyhow.

This said, whether this a grift, or a way to put Trump's stamp on the White House, or both, he's always been a believer that more is more. So, he could be doing preliminary work toward some other construction project to go along with the ballroom. The White House indoor driving range? The White House fast food court? The White House tanning salon? The White House zoo? Who knows?

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D.D. in Hollywood, FL, asks: Do you see any possibility Trump could ever win the Nobel Peace Prize? Can't help thinking that, if that happened, it would downgrade the prize just like he did by giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

(V) & (Z) answer: We have answered this basic question before, but we get it a lot, so we will answer again. The people who award the Nobel despise Trump and everything that he stands for. That said, this is not necessarily disqualifying, as they have given the award to other people they despise, like Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger.

But since they consider Trump to be odious, and since he's done much more to create conflict than to promote peace, he would have to play a BIG role in accomplishing something that the Committee simply cannot overlook. The obvious possibility, not that it's going to happen, would be a peace in Israel that fundamentally changes the dynamic there. It would not be enough to merely persuade everyone to stop shooting, it would have to be something like recognition of Palestinian statehood, along with a pledge from the various Arab Nations to leave Israel alone. Something that not only ends the war in Ukraine, but also changes the dynamic there, like Russia withdrawing from Crimea and Ukraine being admitted to NATO, would probably do it, too.

We do not foresee Trump and his team accomplishing anything along these lines. But if it did happen, he likely would get a Nobel.

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A.S. in Black Mountain, NC, asks: The phrase consistently appearing at the end of TCF's rants, "Thank you for your attention to this matter," is mysterious to me. When did it first appear? It does not seem like a phrase he would use. He does not seem to me to be a person that says "Thank You," like when the caddy drops a new golf ball in the fairway.

What is your take on it?

(V) & (Z) answer: He's been using it, off and on, since at least 2019.

The general pattern, such as it is, is that he uses that phrase when he wants to identify a Tweet/Truth as an "official" order. Maybe that's to help his staff sort things out, maybe that's to help himself remember, maybe it's to give greater gravitas to the "important" things, maybe all of the above.

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E.W. in Silver Spring, MD, asks: His Royal Highness has a lot of expressions he uses over and over, such as "like a dog," "levels not even thought possible," and "it's unbelievable." Maybe it's because of the absurdity of what goes with the phrases, but he seems to repeatedly use the same phrase over and over again. I don't remember Bush the elder, Bill Clinton, Bush the younger, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden reaching for such a short list of expressions. Did I miss them? If not what were some of them?

(V) & (Z) answer: There has not been a president, at least not in the century or so that a huge volume of presidential utterances have been documented/recorded, who relies on as limited a linguistic toolkit as does Trump. Language is one facet of intelligence, and Trump is the lowest-intelligence president in that timeframe, at least in this particular domain. So, it makes sense that he would have less range than any of his predecessors.

That said, we don't think that is the primary explanation. We think the primary explanation is that Trump has been an inveterate, baldfaced liar for well over half a century. Long ago, he learned which "scripts" work best for peddling his lies, and he's been using those scripts ever since. You will note that most of his most hackneyed, cliché "catchphrases" tend to signal that a lie is forthcoming or is in the process of being told. That is certainly true of the expression that WE most associate with him, which is "people say..."

We would be remiss if we did not also note that reduced verbal skills, and repetition of phrases, are also symptoms of dementia.

Politics

K.C. in Columbus, OH, asks: The ongoing narrative, since November 2024, seems to be that the Democratic ticket got crushed, and that a major course correction is needed. However, the popular vote was Trump 49 to Harris 48; by no means a landslide. I realize that Democrats had been winning the popular vote in previous elections, but Harris was only the presidential candidate for roughly 100 days. Given all that, do you think that the Democrats need to be careful not to overadjust their tactics for the next presidential election?

(V) & (Z) answer: Given the constraints that Harris ran under, like a 100-day campaign, she performed remarkably well. The entire world was in the midst of a post-pandemic backlash, and in a year that EVERY incumbent government that was up for election in ANY country lost, she actually outperformed the average incumbent party by 2 points.

We doubt that Democrats will seriously adjust their approach to campaigning, or their stance on the issues. However, Democratic primary voters may well prefer a very different TYPE of presidential candidate (say, a moderate white man). That will itself be a major change in tactics, even if everything else basically stays the same.

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R.H.D. in Webster, NY, asks: The Texas redistricting battle has made me wonder about the current Republican elected officials in the age of Donald Trump. I would group them into three categories:

1. Those who go along with him out of fear of being primaried
2. Those who do his bidding because they have nothing to lose
3. The true believers who practice the gospel according to Trump, public opinion be damned

A couple of questions. First, do you agree with my categories of today's Republicans? Any changes you wish to make? Second, where do you put Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) in this? I think he is either in categories 2 or 3. I base this not only because of redistricting, but also on his positions on things like abortion and immigration.

(V) & (Z) answer: Here is our list:

1. Those who go along with him out of fear of being primaried
2. The true believers who practice the gospel according to Trump, public opinion be damned
3. Those who are trying to steal some of the gravy from the Trump train
4. The apostates

As you can see, we agree with your first and third categories. However, we don't really understand the second one, and can't think of anyone who would clearly fit in that category. Meanwhile, we think you overlook people who aren't too worried about the harm Trump will do, but who see an opportunity to burnish their own support by aligning themselves with him. This is the category where we would put Abbott, not to mention Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Marco Rubio, and a host of others.

It is, of course, possible for someone to move between categories, depending on circumstances. For example, Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul (both R-KY) are true believers at some times, and are apostates at other times. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-LA) and John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) are true believers at some times, and go along to avoid being primaried at other times. Graham is also an apostate, on rare occasions, though he generally thinks better of it very quickly, and returns his spine to the safe deposit box where it usually lives.

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J.P.R. in Westminster, CO, asks: In response to your RedState rundown on Democratic candidate prospects: I have also encountered a characterization of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a "fu**ing idiot" by a self-described "small c" conservative (read non-MAGA) guy who I very much like and respect and who I frankly think should know better. Where do you believe this characterization might come from?

(V) & (Z) answer: Some people assume that anyone who is attractive, young, and female must be dumb. That is even more likely if the person is brown, or if their hair is blonde.

Some people use "low IQ," "stupid," "idiot," etc. as all-purpose insults that mean the same thing as "jerk," "a**hole," and "shmuck," in the same way that "bastard" has largely become divorced from the actual facts of one's parentage.

Some people, due to their own issues with intelligence, or their own chauvinisms, have not realized that two people can honestly and intelligently assess the same evidence, and come to very different conclusions. Such people believe that their conclusion is the ONLY intelligent one, and that anyone who reaches a different conclusion must therefore not be intelligent.

Some bubbles are pretty incestuous, for lack of a better word, and once an idea circulates in that bubble for a while, it becomes a "fact," because hey, everyone is saying it, so it must be true. This happens a lot in sports, where an athlete gains a reputation for having [X] skill, or for lacking [Y] attribute, or for having [Z] shortcoming. And that will sometimes become dogma, whether or not it is actually supported by evidence. We have no doubt there are notions that circulate regularly in the right-wing media bubble that have been repeated so many times, nobody thinks critically about them anymore.

Some people don't realize that most politicians engage in code-switching when speaking to large groups. That is to say, those politicians speak in a manner less sophisticated than they would use with colleagues, so as to make sure everyone in the audience understands. This can be misinterpreted as stupidity, if you are unaware of the technique.

We are not sure which of these applies to your friend, though we think that pretty much all of them apply to the fellow who wrote the piece for RedState.

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P.J. in Quakertown, PA, asks: Proud Boys, Charlottesville, "Jews will not replace us," "good people on both sides." All associated with or spoken by Republicans.

How on earth have the Democrats been labeled as antisemites, while the Republicans get to claim they are pro-Jewish?

(V) & (Z) answer: We often take notice of the old expression: "In every accusation, there is a confession." There are many criticisms that are more appropriately directed at the Republican Party, but that Republicans try to deflect by accusing the Democrats of same. The most obvious of those is "racist," an assertion that is backed with the true, but misleading, assertion that it was Democrats who owned slaves, started the KKK, etc.

"Democrats are antisemites" is another case of deflection, one enabled by a number of high-profile right-wing Jewish media figures (e.g, Ben Shapiro) who insist it is true. This particular criticism has caught on in the last year or two, in particular, because Democrats are much more likely to be Israel-skeptical/Israel-critical/Palestine-sympathetic.

We do not propose that Democrats have NO issues with racism, or NO issues with antisemitism. But on these two issues, and several others, Republicans are definitely throwing stones from the balconies of their glass houses.

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M.M. in San Diego, CA, asks: Did Michael Savage (of whom I was unaware until reading your post about him) make the name change so he could refer to himself as "Doc Savage"?

(V) & (Z) answer: Close, but not quite. It was so he could call his show "Savage Nation."

There may be a second reason, though Savage would never admit it. In his 1960s, hippy-dippy days, he was a friend and admirer of Allen Ginsberg, and sent Ginsberg numerous laudatory letters, some of which are now held by Stanford University. Ginsberg eventually emerged as an advocate of pederasty, and a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association. So, Savage might be trying to place some distance between himself and those letters he wrote under his original name.

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J.M. in Norco, CA, asks: You responded to a question from K.C. in West Islip, giving your thoughts on the relative offensiveness and disrespect shown by professional sports teams' names that relate to Native American people, history, or culture. Well, as luck would have it, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said some things in an interview on Monday that so irritated our President that he referred to her as "Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren" in his angry "Truth" response.

So, do tell: would you consider this to be offensive or disrespectful to Native Americans?

(V) & (Z) answer: It's a tough call. There is 0% chance that Trump expends any energy on worrying about whom his words might offend or slur; he just lets the cards fall where they may. The nickname is not really meant to slur Native Americans, it's meant to mock Warren for claiming Native American heritage that she may not have.

That said, Trump is nonetheless using a Native American name as an insult. Also, our usual test for offensiveness is: "Would we be willing to say it in a classroom?" And this, we would not. Our conclusion, then, is that it's not a 10 on the offensive/disrespectful to Native Americans scale, and it's probably not a 5, but it's not a 0, either.

Civics

T.L. in San Francisco, CA, asks: Would it be reasonable to say that the U.S. is in a state of civil war (but fought mostly by non-military means), and has been for many years?

(V) & (Z) answer: For obvious reasons, many people have become familiar with the concept of "stochastic terrorism," which Dictionary.com defines as "the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted."

If we want to extend that concept, to the notion of a "stochastic civil war," then we'd say there's a pretty good case to be made for your characterization.

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C.J.R. in Avondale, AZ, asks: You've written about this before. But with a couple more years of evidence, has John Roberts now clearly moved ahead of Roger Taney as Most Atrocious Chief Justice of All Time?

(V) & (Z) answer: It's tough, because it's apples and oranges. Taney is primarily wrecked by one very bad decision, a decision that just so happened to pave the way for the Civil War.

Roberts is more of a "death by a thousand cuts" chief justice, who has overseen a whole bunch of problematic decisions and ethical lapses, but none that rises to the level of Dred Scott. Also, we don't know what the medium- and long-term effects of the Roberts Court's jurisprudence will be.

So, we are going to stick with Taney as the worst chief justice, but with the caveat that the events of the next 10-20 years could very easily push Roberts into the lead.

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J.N. in Las Vegas, NV, asks: I have a question about Greg Abbott and the Democrats hiding in Illinois. What is preventing the governor from petitioning for a writ of mandamus? From my layman's understanding of this writ, this would compel the attendance of the absent legislators, and non-compliance would then give rise to a criminal charge, which in turn would be grounds for extradition.

(V) & (Z) answer: There are two problems. The first, and somewhat more abstruse, is that while a writ of mandamus does compel action from officeholders, it can only be issued in very specific circumstances, and "a legislator did not show up to work" is not one of those.

The second problem is that federal judges cannot issue writs of mandamus to state officials. And Texas judges cannot cause writs of mandamus to be enforced beyond Texas state lines. So, even if a writ of mandamus was appropriate here, there is no judge who could issue one that would actually get the Texas Democrats back to work.

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F.L. in Allen, TX (though hopefully somewhere else and soon), asks: The Texas Democrats have 'engineered' (as an actual PE, I rather dislike that usage) a form of filibuster. And this is hardly the first time they've used it. It's sort of a filibuster with feet. Or wings, perhaps. Has this been done in the U.S. House and/or Senate? Could it be done?

(V) & (Z) answer: It can be done, but it's rare, with the last occasion having been in 1988.

There are three major differences that explain why it happens in Texas and not in D.C. The first is that Texas has a long history of quorum-jumping, dating back to the 19th century, while the institutional culture of the U.S. Congress is very much against quorum-jumping. The second is that the Texas legislature meets very infrequently, making it much more possible to "run out the clock," whereas Congress meets year-round. The third is that the Texas Constitution defines quorum as "two-thirds of the elected members of the legislature," while the U.S. Constitution defines quorum as "half the elected members of the legislature." So, it's much easier for the majority party in Congress to defeat quorum-jumping, since they might only have to track down a small handful of members.

Note that it is extra-difficult to engage in quorum-jumping in the House, because the rules of the House presume that a quorum exists unless a member brings up a point of order to the contrary. And such points of order can only be raised in very, very limited circumstances.

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M.C. in Indianapolis, IN, asks: How the heck is Indiana gonna go about gerrymandering its maps further than it already is? We have two Democrats in the House, one from Indianapolis, the other from Lake County. They can't do any better than that.

(V) & (Z) answer: The Trump administration follows this math:

Red state + More than 1 district with a Democratic representative = Gerrymander opportunity

It does not matter if it actually works, math-wise, or map-wise. In fairness, the Democrats looking at Washington and licking their lips are guilty of the same error.

History

A.N. in Tempe, AZ, asks: I have seen a number of videos that tell a most interesting version of American history, by Tad Stoermer, a Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia, graduate of Harvard, and currently a lecturer at Johns Hopkins. He talks about his upcoming book, A Resistance History of the United States, where he claims the Founders were promoting an independent republic very much in alignment with the attitudes expressed today by the Patriot/white supremacist movements, that the true revisionists are more modern historians. While he is very clearly opposed to the beliefs of the white supremacists and so-called Patriots, he claims there is little space between their beliefs and those of the Founders such as Thomas Jefferson, according to the writings of the Founders themselves. Is Stoermer a respected historical scholar? Can you comment on his claims about the U.S. Founders?

(V) & (Z) answer: Stoermer brands himself a "public historian." That is a very broad categorization that covers everything from reenactors to museum guides to authors of popular works to podcasters. In his case, he's making a living, in part, from securing lectureships and other part-time academic gigs. And, in part, from selling product, like books and articles for popular magazines. You rarely make money by writing a book whose basic lesson is "Everything you think you know about [X] is... basically right." You have a much better chance if you write a book whose basic lesson is "Everything you think you know about [X] is... completely wrong." Point is, Stoermer has a very compelling interest in being a provocateur. Usually, such folks are not making things up out of whole cloth, and they do believe what they are saying, at least on some level. However, they do tend to frame things in the most... assertive way possible.

Stoermer hasn't published his book yet, so we can't look at it. But it appears your characterization of his basic argument is on the mark. And, if so, it's not a great argument. Let's start with an analogy. If Person A drives from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, using primarily the 15 freeway, and Person B drives from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, at the same time, and using primarily the 15 freeway, both people will spend some amount of time in the same exact place (probably Barstow). However, they are eventually going to end up 450 miles apart.

When the Constitution was written, white supremacy was the default position, and so was basically assumed. The same is true of separate spheres for men and women, and a number of other ideas that would be anathema in modern America.

However, the Framers were inheritors of the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. That means, first and foremost, that they believed in evidence-based solutions and they were leery of strong, centralized authority. Neither of these things is remotely true of modern-day far-right types, who admire fascists like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and who believe what their gut tells them to believe, evidence or no.

A key implication of the Enlightenment's disdain for strong, central authority was skepticism about rigid social structures (which, after all, were the foundation of feudalism). Pretty much all of the Framers desired social mobility, at least for white men. And some thinkers, even of the Revolutionary generation, had begun to extend that to things like gender and race. Alexander Hamilton was pretty forward thinking in many ways, and so were Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Patrick Henry was truly radical. If we head across the pond, the Marquis de Condorcet was positively pinko by the standards of his day, and called for equal rights for women and for Black Frenchmen. These fellows were traveling a road that would have led, and did lead, to much greater equality in human societies. And the generation of thinkers who achieved ascendancy in the antebellum era—William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, etc.—picked up that baton and ran with it.

By contrast, the white supremacists and the other far-right types are fundamentally backward-looking, and would like to see society return to a place where it was (or, where they imagine it was) many generations in the past. They are headed to Las Vegas, while the Framers are headed to Los Angeles. They may be in the same place for a moment in time, but their journeys have very different endpoints.

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M.H. in Salt Lake City, UT, asks: I am not a lawyer, but I am fascinated by how those who write important legal decisions use past cases to make a point. I would love to read a book describing perhaps the top 100 Supreme Court cases, the logic and legal arguments used to make these decisions (including the dissents), the political contexts in which they were made, and how these decisions were later used to support or contradict future decisions. Does such a book exist?

(L) answers: A really helpful one is Essential Supreme Court Decisions: Summaries of Leading Cases in U.S. Constitutional Law by John R. Vile. For more palace intrigue, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin, gives a look into the inner workings of the Supreme Court. Robert G. McCloskey's The American Supreme Court looks at the Court through a political and social context, so that may also be of some interest. McCloskey was a political scientist from Harvard, not a lawyer, so he comes at the subject from a different perspective. Among other things, the book examines the Lochner Era, when the Court was striking down economic regulations and labor laws under a narrow reading of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce in favor of states' rights.

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E.W. in Skaneateles, NY, asks: Why was there never an East vs. West civil war in the U.S.? (Besides in gangsta rap music, of course.) What conditions might have made a civil war actually happen?

(V) & (Z) answer: From an ideological standpoint, there was no issue or group of issues that divided the country along those lines. From a practical standpoint, the population of the West was just a small fraction of the population of the East until well after World War II, by which point a civil war would have been impractical. Would-be secessionists need to have weaponry that is at least something of a match for the weaponry possessed by the government, and by 1960 the gap between private armaments and government armaments was bigger than the Grand Canyon.

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C.F. in Waltham, MA, asks: I don't expect Donald Trump to be shown as last on a list of presidential rankings until 2029, given that most professors want to keep their colleges alive (and possibly also keep their jobs). However, do you think Trump could possibly be anything but ranked dead last with all the corruption and damage he is doing to our country? I was wondering if he could be eventually be viewed as very effective, simply because he made dramatic changes. Is that possible for historians to use that criteria to rank him highly in the future?

(V) & (Z) answer: C-SPAN surveyed scholars in 2021, and Trump ranked 41, beating out only Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Siena surveyed scholars in 2022, and Trump ranked 43, beating out only James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Trump was able to drop two ranks because he not only lost out to Pierce, he also lost out to Joe Biden, who was not included in the 2021 survey, and who ranked 19 in the 2022 survey. Point being, today's historians have no problem calling it as they see it.

Over time, the question with Trump will be very similar to the question we discuss above, about John Roberts vs. Roger Taney. The dissolution of the union is the great crisis of American history, and the politicians and jurists who screwed it up get hit hard. Trump does not have a crisis of that sort on his watch (COVID was bad, but not Civil War bad), but he does have a longer list of transgressions than any of the three Civil War-era presidents who are not Lincoln. He's not likely to do well in any future ranking, but how many of the Civil War-era screw-ups he manages to outrank is an open question.

It is highly improbable that, 50 or 100 years from now, Trump will shoot up the list because he did a lot of things. First, if they are bad things, then increasing the volume of them is not a selling point. Second, and here's a dirty secret for you, even professional historians think of only a small handful of things when they think of any given president (outside of the handful of "greats," perhaps). So, Trump is likely to be reduced to two or three or four "signature" résumé items. The 1/6 insurrection will certainly be one of those; the others are a work in progress. But we see no path for him to join the Harry S. Trumans and Dwight D. Eisenhowers, much less the George Washingtons and Franklin D. Roosevelts. The best-case scenario, we would say, is that Trump pulls off one enduring miracle, like bringing peace to the Middle East, and that's enough to push him into the 30s or low 20s.

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S.E.Z. in New Haven, CT, asks: Among your list of candidates for a new edition of Profiles in Courage, why did Liz Cheney not make the cut? As the most prominent GOP congressperson to sacrifice her political career by speaking truth to treasonous power, surely you must have considered her.

(V) & (Z) answer: Profiles in Courage was explicitly limited to U.S. Senators.

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F.S. in Cologne, Germany, asks: Who are the 10 most influential dead people in U.S. history? Is Jeffrey Epstein among them?

(V) & (Z) answer: We thought a fair bit about your question, and decided a couple of things. The first is that what you are really asking about is not the 10 most influential dead people, per se, but the 10 people whose influence in death was largest relative to their influence in life. For example, Thomas Edison is plenty influential today, and so too are Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. But that's only because they were incredibly influential in life, and that influence has lingered.

The second thing we decided is that there's no way to rank our answer, because there are so many different paths by which a person can achieve greater import in death than in life, and they're not always similar. That means we're going to give you ten categories, with some examples in each. And so:

1. Jesus of Nazareth: He gets his own category because if we WERE doing a ranking, he'd be #1. There is no doubt that he was an itinerant preacher of local significance who only became a person of global significance after his death, thanks to Saul of Tarsus (a.k.a. St. Paul), and then later the embrace of Christianity by the leader of the Roman Empire. Obviously, his ideas, and the religions that believe they represent those ideas, have had a profound impact on the United States.
   
   
2. The Martyrs: Some of these folks were notable, even while they were alive. Some were not. But they all became vastly more important and impactful in death, as a rallying point/inspiration for one group or another. People in this category include John Brown, Anne Frank, Medgar Evers and Harvey Milk.
   
   
3. The Apostrophes: The term "apostrophe law" refers to a law that is inspired by, and named after, the victim of a particular crime. Those victims thus have a lasting impact, because their loss serves to save others who might otherwise have been victimized. People in this category include Ryan White, Adam Walse, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd Jr., Amber Hagerman, Megan Kanka and Jessica Lunsford.
   
   
4. The Culture Wars: These are people who became the focal point of one culture wars battle or another. For example, there are some who would say Terri Schiavo was dead long before her heart stopped beating, there are others who say she was still alive and should have been kept that way. Similarly, there are some who would say that the various Babies Doe who were aborted after Roe were living beings who are now dead, and others would strongly disagree. Interestingly, virtually everyone believes one of these two entities (Schiavo or the Babies Doe) would belong on this list, but few believe that neither or both belong. Others in this category include Laken Riley and Ashli Babbitt, and this is where Jeffrey Epstein belongs, as well, we would say.
   
   
5. The Misunderstood Geniuses: These are folks whose artistic impact was limited in their own time, who were "discovered" after their deaths, and who became very important in their fields. People in this category include Robert Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson and John Kennedy Toole.
   
   
6. The Icons: These are folks who had a big artistic impact during their lives, but whose legend grew once they died, invariably prematurely. People in this category include Oscar Wilde, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur.
   
   
7. The Honored Dead: Here we have people who died tragically, and who are now the focus of regular, national mourning and remembrance. People in this category include The Unknown Soldier(s), the soldiers named on the Vietnam Memorial and the victims of 9/11.
   
   
8. The Crime Victims: Some crimes capture the public imagination, and their victims achieve great fame, and even impact, in death. People in this category include Nicole Brown Simpson, Andrew and Abby Borden and The Black Dahlia.
   
   
9. The Flashpoints: These are folks whose death was the final straw, or the near-final straw, and whose death led directly to a major uprising, as well as the political and social aftermath of that uprising. People in this category include George Floyd, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, Eugene Williams (Chicago Race Riots of 1919) and José Gallardo Díaz (Sleepy Lagoon Case/Zoot Suit Riots).
   
   
10. The Matildas: The Matilda Effect is the tendency to downplay the accomplishments of women scientists. It's a problem today, and it was a real problem in generations past. As a result, some very important women scientists' work was either largely unknown, or was not properly appreciated, until after their demise. People in this category include Nettie Stevens, Eunice Foote, Rosalind Franklin, Esther Lederberg, Ida Noddack, Chien-Shiung Wu and Kay McNulty.

We know that some of these people are not Americans. But we think they belong nonetheless, because of their impact on American culture and society.

Fun Stuff

B.B. in St. Louis, MO, asks: I seem to recall the two baseball situations you describe as being in the book So You Think You Know Baseball by Harry Simmons (published 1960), which describes several bizarre situations which could occur in a baseball game and challenges the reader to make the correct call. Was this, in fact, your source?

(V) & (Z) answer: No. At least, not directly. The source was As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Wise, which (Z) read several years ago. Wise is a top-notch reporter, and so is surely a good researcher. It's very possible that he read the Simmons book, and borrowed from it.

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B.J. in Arlington, MA, asks: William Shakespeare lived approximately 500 years ago. J.S. Bach lived about 250 years ago. Both are still recognized as major contributors to the human project. There are other artists of other works of art from the distant past that are still revered today, but of course most art by most artists is long forgotten.

In 300-500 years, what films or filmmakers from our era do you think will have stood the test of time and be revered as the works of Shakespeare and Bach are today, if any? And what music or musicians? Poems or poets? Or any other forms of art you have opinions on.

(V) & (Z) answer: There is a pretty important difference between the modern era and eras past, and that is that the actual performances might survive into the future. We can't watch Shakespeare in action, but people in the future might plausibly watch Marlon Brando. We can't hear Bach play the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, but people in the future might plausibly listen to Michael Jackson perform "Thriller." It's hard to know exactly what the implications of this will be.

That said, the things most likely to survive will have two qualities, we think. The first is that they will have a universal quality, in terms of the subjects and themes they embrace, and possibly the techniques they use. The second is that they will be ubiquitous in our time, increasing the odds of some copies surviving well into the future.

Musically, the 20th century artists that have the best chance of being known 500 years from now are, in our opinion, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elton John, the Gershwins, and some of the major Broadway composers, like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Rodgers and Hammerstein. In terms of film, we would pick Westerns, especially the most prominent films made by John Wayne, and the Star Wars films. Among TV shows, I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show and Cheers. For visual artists, Picasso and Andy Warhol.

Gallimaufry

T.W. in Norfolk, England, UK, asks: I'm sure you get a lot of e-mails (you've mentioned your mailbag before is substantial), but you mentioned you get lots of "pointed" e-mails on certain subjects. I just wondered, on an average day (assuming any day these days could qualify as average, given the amount of bovine excrement there is in the news from certain quarters), what sort of percentage of your mailbag is written by scenery-chewing, swivel-eyed loons versus that which is considered and polite?

(V) & (Z) answer: We don't get too many e-mails from "scenery-chewing, swivel-eyed loons," as we would conceive of that term, except in the lead-up to elections. What we do get is e-mails from people who have very strong opinions about a particular subject, backed by strong emotions, and who decide to put aside decorum and lash out because they disagree with what we wrote.

The number of e-mails like that, on any given day, varies a lot, depending on what we wrote, of course. Also, it depends how pointed something has to be to qualify—approaching the line, crossing it, or crossing WAY over it? In the average week, we probably get a dozen e-mails that we find uncollegial, of which three or four will be in "crossing a line" territory. And of those three or four, maybe one will cross the line far enough to merit a block on future e-mails.

Reader Question of the Week: We Shall Return

Here is the question we put before readers last week:

N.M.D. in Duluth, MN, asks: What are some good places to visit in Europe that have historical connections to World War II and the Holocaust?

And here some of the answers we got in response:

C.S. in Philadelphia, PA: My wife and I traveled to Italy in 2018. The Florence American Cemetery is stunning. Tourist sites in Italy are focused around ancient Rome or the Renaissance, coupled with that nation being the forgotten front of World War II. Seeing the rows of crosses and stars, many unknowns, was a moving experience. The Italian staff member we met was committed to preserving the memory and history of those killed. Also interesting was the number of Japanese-American servicemen buried there.

The Stumbling Stones in Rome and Venice, often in the city's Jewish ghettos (yes, they are still called ghettos) give names of the victims who lived in that building. They are small, but individualized memorials to those murdered.

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S.W. in New York City, NY: While traveling in western, central and eastern Europe and visiting many camps, ghettos and Holocaust sites, the place that impacted me the most was a visit to my ancestral community of Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania. I flew to Vilna and took a car service to Kaunas, about 90 minutes away, where I stayed for a couple of days. I hired a guide who was one of the few Jews remaining in the city and we walked the entire city viewing various sites that were originally Jewish schools, synagogues, hospitals, etc., and finally the German Army-created ghettos for the Jewish residents and the Ninth Fort, where massive extermination of the city's Jews took place in short order.

The German Army, which had already conquered neighboring Poland in 1939, entered Lithuania early in the war (Operation Barbarossa in June 1941)) and began its outright extermination of the Jews within 72 hours of arrival. It's a sobering and somber journey to witness this destruction.

A visit to neighboring Vilna is just as emotional. Vilna, which Napoleon called the "Jerusalem of the North," with its vast history of Jewish life and historical/biblical documents, became a major extermination site at Ponary (Paneriai) Forest just outside of the city.

I would advise anyone taking a historical journey like this to spend time reading numerous survivor-written books about the destruction of the Lithuanian Jewish communities before taking the trip.

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J.B. in San Bruno, CA: On my bucket list of World War II sites to visit is the town of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. France has left the remains of the massacred village as is for the past 81 years as a reminder to forthcoming generations.

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M.L. in Simpsonville, SC: If you're visiting Normandy for the D-Day beaches (and don't forget Juno, since the Juno Beach Centre is superlative and well worth a visit even if you are not Canadian), I find it interesting to go and follow through to the end of the battle of Normandy at the Falaise Gap. There is a Tiger tank forming a memorial at Vimoutiers, which is of note, and the excellent Polish museum at Mont Ormel is also worth your time.

Also, if you're doing the Falaise Gap, you can visit William the Conqueror's castle at Falaise, which is super cool. It's not World War II, but it's just so much fun, it's worth a stop.

Finally, I would wholeheartedly recommend visiting Dieppe in northern Normandy. It's worth it. The tragic history of the disastrous raid becomes so clear when standing on the beach looking up at the cliffs of Pourville or Puys. For Americans, this is your history, too, but it's often overlooked—the U.S. Army Rangers had their first combat in the European Theatre as part of this raid on August 19, 1942. This is largely remembered as a Canadian loss, and with reason.

About 15 years ago there was a Bell Canada commercial that featured Dieppe. This raid is one of those bits of history that really separates Canadians and Americans on a cultural level. Here is a link in case you're interested. And here is a one-minute overview of the battle from the Canadian POV, courtesy of Historica.

Canadian historian Terry Copp's work was essential reading on my Normandy travels. Here is his guidebook.

I had the amazing luck some years ago of being able to work with Canadian historians, helping to deliver professional development to history teachers on the ground in northern France and in Normandy. It was the best summer job I ever had.

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R.R. in Pasadena, CA: People should visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. They have made a quite good museum out of the warehouse that Frank and her compatriots hid in, and it really gives you a sense of what they went through living in there for more than a year, having to stay hidden and quiet all day, lest some warehouse worker hear a sound and become suspicious.

It's such a small space that it's hard to imagine eight people existing in there together for so long, and the reason why they did that, and the fact that seven of them were eventually murdered by the Nazis, gnaws on you the entire time you're walking around. The fear that drove them all into that circumstance, and the fact that it was basically futile in the end, is a quiet exclamation of what the Nazis really did to people, and what authoritarians generally do... the parallels to immigrants in America now hiding from ICE raids is very apt.

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D.G. in Valley Village, CA: The Ten Boom family watch shop, the story of which was put on the silver screen in a movie known as The Hiding Place. It is a small shop in Haarlem, The Netherlands, where the Ten Boom family (who ran a watch repair business) lived and worked. Sincere and evangelical (the meaning before the term was politicized), the family hid Jews during the War, constructing a false wall in a closet to hide behind. Eventually raided, the Ten Booms were arrested, but the Jews they were hosting all were saved in their hiding places. The elderly patriarch of the family died in Nazi custody, while the two spinster sisters were sent to Auschwitz and were released due to a bureaucratic error after months of laboring.

There are scheduled tours, I believe, in the afternoon. The Ten Booms have long since passed but volunteers lead the tour. I am an atheist, but I willingly tolerated the mild proselytizing by these volunteers and even viewed it as an insight into their motivations. When I went, I believe they took only donations (no fees). It's a 10 minute thing and if you are in Haarlem for the Groit Kirk or the art you might wish to stop in.

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R.L. in Alameda, CA: Good places to visit in Europe that have historical connections to World War II and the Holocaust are... anywhere in Poland. I just returned from an Ancestral Journey throughout eastern Poland (part of the former Pale of Settlement) with a group of 18 American Ashkenazi Jews. Poland was squeezed between (and occupied by) two of the major powers in the war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Non-Jewish Poles suffered the war and the Holocaust right alongside their Jewish neighbors. Not-so-fun fact: An estimated 12 million souls were murdered by the Nazis, double the 6 million that the American and Israeli Jewish community reminds the world of. Among those numbers were 3 million non-Jewish Poles who perished in labor, concentration and death camps. To this day, non-Jewish Poles feel the pain of the Holocaust just like we American Jews do.

Every place we visited, from the largest cities (Kraków, Lublin, Warsaw) to the smallest villages (that you've never heard of, some with a mere 1,000 residents today) has a monument to those who fought in or were victims of the war. Some have a single monument for all who perished. Some have separate monuments for Jewish victims (erected after the fall of the communist government) next to the brutalist Communist-era monument that ignored them. Many villages have small museums to commemorate their history, often run by volunteer "memory keepers," non-Jewish Poles who have dedicated themselves to restoring the memory of what their villages looked like before the Nazis hauled away and murdered half of the residents. You can't go anywhere in Poland and not be reminded of the war.

While in Warsaw, you can easily find where the ghetto walls were. There are markers and monuments throughout that part of the city. You can visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which covers 1,000 years of Jewish history in the region (at the turn of the 20th century, it is estimated that 80% of the world's Jews lived there). It includes an extensive section on World War II and the Holocaust. The Jewish Historical Institute, also in Warsaw, contains archives that were collected and hidden by the people confined within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. There is an extensive archive/museum in Lublin at the Grodzka Gate—NN Theatre Centre.

The Nazis built all of their concentration and death camps on Polish soil (labor camps, too, but there were some of these in Germany as well). We visited Plaszow outside of Kraków, Majdanek outside of Lublin and Treblinka an hour or so east of Warsaw. Each has a different take based on how the camp was used and what remained after the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes. There are so many others (Auschwitz, Sobibor and Belzec, to name a few). I don't recommend visiting all of them. The human psyche can only handle so much darkness.

Many cities and villages have synagogues that survived the war (largely masonry structures that were useful as, say, a stable or storage facility). A few in the larger cities have been restored and are in use today. Some have been restored but are in small villages where there are no Jews to use them. So, memory keepers have turned them into museums or community centers. In Sejny, near the Lithuanian border, the synagogue serves as a venue for the Klezmer Orchestra of the Sejny Theatre.

Many cities and villages have delineated and restored (as much as possible) the Jewish cemeteries. The German army desecrated them, removing the tombstones (matzevot in Hebrew) and using them as pavers for the new roads they built to their death camps. The roads are gone now and the matzevot distributed to the winds. As these are discovered (often in people's gardens or as part of the foundation of building), memory keepers collect them and return them to the cemeteries. There is no way of knowing where the bodies were interred, so they are often collected in a central location within the cemetery boundaries. Some Jewish cemeteries remain intact, including the Okopowa Cemetery in Warsaw and this one in Tarnow.

These are just the places that my group visited during our 2 weeks together. I should mention the Taube Center for Jewish Life & Learning, based in Warsaw. They organized our tour and are a great resource, even if you are traveling alone.

Incidentally, if you are an Ashkenazi Jew and an organized tour like the one I just returned from interests you, get in touch with me privately through (V) or (Z).

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L.S.-H. in Naarden, The Netherlands: Recently I was in Kraków for a conference and had the opportunity to do a couple of tours beforehand. One was a guided tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau, which I think is a good place to start. Our highly trained guide was extremely knowledgeable and patiently answered tons of questions about the buildup to war and incarceration, all facets of "life" there, and the aftermath. It was 7 hours from start to finish but, of course, was well worth it.

Another must-see tour was of Kraków's Jewish Quarter and former ghetto. It's a lot of walking, but the excellent guide from Kraków Explorers takes you along (in a personal way, as if you were there at that time and place) through the history of Jewish life in Kraków—from before the war to the former Jewish ghetto to the survivors and remembrance after the war.

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M.P. in Scotts Valley, CA: Birkenau.

As an engineer, I was impressed with the clarity and efficiency of the layout and operations.

As a person, I walked around in a cold sweat for the entire duration.

The utter inhumanity. The inherent horror in that place. What those poor souls went through.

I take small souvenirs, like a stone, when I travel, but I wanted nothing, nothing from that place.

"Never Again" rings so hollow as Israel, under Netanyahu, is gleefully building what they promised to prevent for all time.

Irony is a cruel mistress.

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R.E.M. in Brooklyn, NY: Auschwitz. This is a physical manifestation of the Holocaust, and the most powerful and horrible thing I have ever seen. You walk the streets, go through the buildings, see the pond full of human ashes. In the museum, there are huge display cases, each one with a collection stolen from the victims: suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, prostheses, etc. The tangible feeling of "Yes, This Is Real" will stay with you forever.

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M.T. in Linköping, Sweden: One of the most sobering World War II-related places you can visit in Europe is Bełżec, a small village in southeastern Poland.

I passed through Bełżec last fall, traveling overland from Sweden to Ukraine. My stop in Ukraine was brief—a quick handover of a small donation to the Ukrainian military—but the route itself offered unexpected moments of reflection.

At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about it. It's an ordinary European village: two rows of houses along a country road, a school, a small library, surrounded by fields, groves, and woods. A railway line cuts across the street.

Villages like this exist all over Europe. That's exactly what makes Bełżec so haunting.

It was the railway that made the Nazis choose this spot. In 1942, Bełżec became one of their key extermination camps. In just a few months, approximately 500,000 people—primarily Polish and Ukrainian Jews—were murdered here. Only Auschwitz and Treblinka saw more deaths.

And yet, few people have ever heard of Bełżec. That's because there were just a handful of survivors. After the war, there were no witnesses left to tell the world what had happened there.

This is why Bełżec is such a powerful place to visit. It reminds us that unimaginable cruelty doesn't require a dramatic setting. It can unfold in the most unremarkable of places—quiet towns and peaceful countryside. Places that look, in many ways, just like our own.

This is a place worth visiting—not for its tourist appeal, but because Bełżec challenges us to remember what can happen when democracy breaks down, when extremism flourishes, and when ordinary people look the other way.

In the end, that's the most important lesson places like Bełżec teach us: The greatest atrocities of history didn't happen in distant lands or on alien soil. They happened in villages and towns that look very much like ours. And that means the responsibility to resist hate belongs to all of us.

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H.S. In Lake Forest, CA: I have been to a number of sites across Europe, including the obvious major concentration camps (incidentally, my brother serves as a tour guide of Auschwitz and the Schindler factory), but I want to highlight a lesser-known but deeply moving site to visit: the Hadamar Memorial in Germany, which was one of the centers of the Aktion T4 program, the Nazi regime's campaign of involuntary euthanasia targeting people with mental and physical disabilities. I first visited this site as a high school student in Germany, and very recently took my family, including my two teenage children. The museum and memorial there offer a powerful and disturbing insight into how medicalized killing was justified, planned, and carried out, even before the Holocaust escalated. The exhibit also traces the pre-Nazi roots of eugenic thinking, making clear that these atrocities didn't begin in 1933.

What's especially haunting is how ordinary professionals like doctors, nurses and bureaucrats participated, using language and logic disturbingly similar to more recent political rhetoric aimed at dehumanizing vulnerable populations, such as that used by the Trump administration in its treatment of immigrants. The memorial also honors those who resisted, most notably Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, whose brave sermons denouncing the killings helped spark public outcry and temporarily halt the program.

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J.B. in London, England, UK: The Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It needs no description, but simply shows that the German nation as a whole understands what it did and how much it regrets that.

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M.W. in Richmond, VA: The Kongresshalle (Congress Hall) in Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Germany, is the largest preserved Nazi rally grounds. Although it was never finished, it was intended as a congress center for the Nazi Party with a self-supporting roof. Standing in the weedy floor of this massive structure, which would have held 50,000 people, and built for the purpose of holding Nazi rallies, is a chilling experience as the visitor imagines what it would have been like to have seen 50,000 Nazis being exhorted into a frenzy of hatred and violence.

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R.S. in Bedford, England, UK: My immediate reaction to the question was Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. This is where the Nazis tried out their first attempts at "the Final Solution" and realised that further development was needed to deal with the numbers involved. It is close to Berlin and you can join a walking tour, as well as having time on your own there.

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N.E.C. in Fairfax, VA: When you travel through Eastern Europe, the landscapes carry whispers of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Every city, every scarred wall, and every quiet memorial bears witness to the darkest chapter of the twentieth century. On my journey last year, I set out to experience those places where history still lingers, where memory has been carefully preserved, and where the past presses close upon the present. These sites particularly intrigued me, not only for their historical value but also their relationship to what is going on in the U.S. today.

No city embodies the weight of that history more than Berlin. The German capital, once the heart of the Nazi regime, is now a living museum of remembrance. Walking through its streets, one can find reminders of both destruction and survival, of both terror and resilience.

The first stop was the site of Hitler's bunker. Today it is nothing more than a grassy field, marked by a modest memorial plaque. There are no grand structures, no theatrical ruins—just a quiet, understated acknowledgment of where the dictator met his end in 1945. Its plainness feels deliberate, ensuring that the place does not become a shrine, but remains a sober reminder of the collapse of tyranny.

Nearby, many of Berlin's central buildings still bear bullet holes and shrapnel scars from the brutal Battle of Berlin. To run one's hand along the pocked stone is to feel the tangible evidence of urban warfare and the desperate struggle that raged in the war's final days. These marks are left unpolished, reminders that history cannot and should not be fully erased.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, however, leaves perhaps the most haunting impression. Covering a vast field near the Brandenburg Gate, it consists of over 2,700 concrete stelae, arranged in rows that rise and fall unevenly. As you wander through the gray corridors, the noise of the city vanishes, and the world narrows to shadow, stone, and silence. The memorial has no single explanation—it is meant to unsettle, to evoke the void left by millions of silenced lives.

Scattered throughout Berlin's neighborhoods are the Stolpersteine, or "stumbling stones." These brass-plated cobblestones are set into sidewalks outside former homes of Jewish families and other victims of Nazi persecution. Each bears a name, date of deportation, and fate. Pausing at them in front of ordinary apartment buildings makes the Holocaust personal—it was not just an event in camps far away, but something that began at the doorsteps of regular homes.

Berlin also houses two former concentration camps within reach: Sachsenhausen to the north, which served as a model camp and administrative center for the SS, and Ravensbrück, a camp primarily for women. To walk through their grounds is to confront the machinery of imprisonment, forced labor, and death. These sites are stark and chilling, yet essential for understanding the reality of Nazi terror.

For a more structured historical account, the Topography of Terror exhibition provides a chronological journey through the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Built on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters, it combines photographs, documents, and personal stories with the very ground where the architects of oppression once stood. Few museums manage to show so clearly how an ideology turned into a system of brutality.

Not far away lies the Book Burning Memorial at Bebelplatz. Here, a glass window set into the pavement reveals empty underground bookshelves—symbolizing the thousands of works destroyed by Nazi students in May 1933. Looking down into that hollow chamber, one feels the cultural violence that paralleled the regime's physical violence, the attempt to erase knowledge and voices deemed "un-German."

Leaving Berlin behind, I traveled into the Czech Republic, to Terezín (Theresienstadt). Unlike Auschwitz or Dachau, Terezín was presented by the Nazis as a "model ghetto." In 1944, they staged it for Red Cross inspectors, with cafés, flower boxes, and art exhibitions designed to create a façade of humane treatment. Yet behind that mask, Terezín was a transit camp, where tens of thousands were sent eastward to extermination centers. Walking through its barracks and courtyards today, one can sense both the ingenuity of the prisoners who created music, art, and culture under oppression, and the cruel deception of those who exploited their creativity for propaganda. It is a place of paradox—beauty created under coercion, suffering hidden behind painted walls.

Prague, too, carries traces of Jewish life before and after the war. Remarkably, several historic synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery survived the Nazi occupation. The Old-New Synagogue, Europe's oldest still-functioning synagogue, and the Pinkas Synagogue, now a memorial inscribed with the names of nearly 80,000 Czech victims of the Holocaust, both anchor the Jewish Quarter. Standing in these sacred spaces, one feels the endurance of a culture that the Nazis sought to extinguish. The survival of Prague's synagogues is sometimes explained by Hitler's macabre wish to preserve the city as a "museum of an extinct race." Today, they instead testify to resilience, continuity, and memory reclaimed.

Traveling through these places—Berlin, Terezín, and Prague—was not easy. At times it felt overwhelming, standing where such cruelty unfolded. But visiting them was necessary. Each site offers a different perspective: the ruins of power in Berlin, the deceit of propaganda in Terezín, the survival of faith in Prague. Together, they remind us that history is not abstract. It is written into the stones of cities, the silence of memorials, and the names engraved in brass and marble.

To journey through Eastern Europe is to encounter the Holocaust not as distant history, but as something present and pressing—a call to remember, and above all, to resist forgetting.

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J.A. in Tunis, Tunisia: Outside of paying respects at concentration camps, the 'Shoes on the Danube Bank' in Budapest remains the most haunting of the various Holocaust memorials I've visited.

Budapest has other reminders, as well as memorials to the later victims of Communism, and is a remarkable city to visit for many reasons.

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S.E.Z. in New Haven, CT: We went on a kosher tour of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague in 2012.

The three holocaust memorials that I still remember most due to the strong impressions they made on me were:

1. The Shoes on the Danube Promenade in Budapest: Our tour guide said that for a while it was called the Red Danube instead of the Blue Danube. Simple. Factual & meaningful. The plaques in English, Hebrew, and a local language make it clear that all the Nazis needed to do was give permission to the local townspeople of Budapest and then stand back and watch.
   
   
2. The Great Synagogue of Pilsen, Czech Republic: The Czech national government maintains the building as a museum. To think that a building of this magnitude was needed in one of so many cities in Europe, but the 50 Jewish families who lived in Pilsen in 2012 used a small space a few blocks away.
   
   
3. Sopron, Hungary: A small town we passed through between the cities we were there to visit had a memorial that truly amazed me. If you don't know Hebrew, you will need a tour guide who can explain all the symbolism packed into this small monument. Every time I revisit the photos I took there, the tears are hard to hold back (and we Vulcan aerospace engineers do not normally cry easily).

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M.S. in Newton, MA: As a Member of the Tribe, and the grandchild of two Holocaust survivors, I am going to avoid the obvious like Auschwitz or other major camps, and go in a different direction:

1. Prague: The way my tour guides explained it, Hitler thought Prague was so beautiful, that he basically left it untouched and never bombed it. I believe the area they call "New Town" was actually built around 700 years ago. The Jewish quarter and synagogues are mostly intact, the old Jewish cemetery survived as well. Prague would show someone what Jewish life was truly like before the Holocaust. Unfortunately, most Jews have left Prague, the architecture is stunning, and the Jewish tour guides do a spectacular job.
   
   
2. Terezín (also in Czech Republic): It was a "way station" that the Nazis used before sending people to the death camps. It's an amazing place to visit and can be done in conjunction with a Prague trip. The Nazis also used it for PR for organizations like the Red Cross, so it has areas that appear to be luxurious, to show that they weren't mistreating the victims of the Holocaust.
   
   
3. Ioannina, Greece: Almost all of the Jews were rounded up during the war and murdered at Auschwitz. There is a small, surviving Jewish community, and a beautiful ancient synagogue with Torah scrolls between 300-600 years old. It is a model of what a small European city was like for Jews in the 1940s. The synagogue is only used a few times a year, but touring the Jewish areas is a really special experience.

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J.B. in Bozeman, MT: Although Spain was technically neutral in the Second World War, if you visit Madrid. I suggest seeing Picasso's bleak but beautiful 1937 painting "Guernica," depicting the destruction of a small Basque village by the Axis powers. Something of a practice run for Poland 1939.

I have seen it in person, and it is jaw dropping. It takes up the whole wall and I feel it captures the horror to come in a few years to the whole world.

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C.S. in Newport, Wales, UK: Anywhere with a Stolperstein.

These are ten-centimeter concrete cubes bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Stolpersteine are placed right into the pavement, usually where the victim last lived. They are now more than 100,000 of them, spread across about 1,000 cities, towns and villages, so you should be able to find some pretty much wherever you go in Europe.

Here is the question for next week:

M.C. in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, asks: Democratic administrations have a track record of being relatively good for the economy and for government debt. Even much of the compassionate welfare spending and healthcare reform turns out to provide excellent value for money: That investment in "human capital" results in productive tax-paying workers in the long term.

So, why are wealthy capitalists so pro-Republican?

Submit your answers to comments@electoral-vote.com, preferably with subject line "Baby You're a Rich Man"!

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---The Votemaster and Zenger