White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki has apparently had enough of Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson's tendency to continue shouting additional questions after White House press briefings have concluded.

On Monday afternoon, near the conclusion of the daily White House briefing — which has become a "circus" of late, according to one veteran White House reporter — Psaki doubled down on the administration's criticism of the "horrific" behavior of some U.S. Border Patrol agents in their handling of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

"I don't think anyone could look at those photos and think that was appropriate action or behavior or something that should be accepted within our administration. There's an investigation. That's ongoing. We'll let that play out," the press secretary said. "But our reaction to the photos has not changed."

That was the end of the briefing — except apparently not for Robinson, the accredited corresponded for far-right cable news channel Newsmax.

"Thank you, everyone," said Psaki. An unidentified reporter responded, "Thank you, Jen," making clear that the briefing was over.

Robinson kept going, calling out, "I have a question. On the polling. The president's polling continues to collapse ..." but got no further.

"Emerald, I know you like to shout at the end," Psaki responded. "Next time, we'll do it during the briefing."

As Psaki departed, briefing book in hand, Robinson made one more try: "Well, if you'd call on me..."

"Thank you so much," Psaki said on her way out with the door.

For her part, Robinson appeared to be pleased with the aftermath of the encounter when down, responding to a video of the exchange by stating, "223,000 views and counting." Robinson also received words of encouragement from Newsmax primetime host Greg Kelly, who wrote, "WOW! PressSec ("Jennifer") really SUCKS at being PressSec."

Psaki's online fans, who refer to her as "#PsakiBomb," naturally believed she had emerged unscathed. But Monday's minor scuffle highlights a challenge that the White House press office continues to face under Biden: rogue right-wing White House reporters, including some with dubious qualifications.

As Salon reported last week, Psaki and her team have also wrestled with how to handle eccentric Christian White House reporter Matthew Anthony Harper, who does not appear for a reputable news agency of any kind. Nevertheless, Harper continues to call for an investigation into both "upper" and "lower" press officials in the Biden White House, against whom he has made highly unspecific allegations of wrongdoing.

Watch the exchange between Robinson and Psaki below, via YouTube:

Jen Psaki slams Newsmax reporter Emerald Robinson over yelling question at end of briefing Salon.com www.youtube.com

During his speech before the UN last week, President Biden said that the United States had closed an era of relentless war in Afghanistan. That high-minded language was an overly idealized description of the American "withdrawal" and what comes next. The truth about America and Afghanistan is much more complicated and dark.

In reality, the U.S. military could not defeat the Taliban over 20 years of war and finally capitulated. The Afghan debacle was part of the larger "War on Terror," also known as the forever wars, that followed the traumatic events of 9/11.

The war in Afghanistan left 2,400 American troops dead and tens of thousands wounded — many of whom will need lifelong care for their physical, psychological and injuries. It is estimated that at least 30,000 current or former service members have committed suicide as a result of trauma suffered in Afghanistan, Iraq and other theaters of the forever wars.

Almost a million people in Afghanistan and across the Middle East have died because of America's endless wars. Thousands of America's Afghan partners were abandoned last month. They and their families are now trying to escape the country or hide from the Taliban for fear of violent retaliation.

The war in Afghanistan cost the American people trillions of dollars, an amount that will continue to grow as interest accrues on the debt. Those vast sums of money could have been used instead to improve health care, infrastructure and education, to address wealth and income inequality and the climate crisis, and to improve the life chances of Americans more generally.

America's war in Afghanistan has come home in other ways. We now have an immensely expanded surveillance society that uses biometric technologies and other innovations out of dystopian speculative fiction, now made real in the present. To discuss these little-understood areas of technology, I recently spoke with investigative journalist and bestselling author Annie Jacobsen, whose books include "Area 51," "The Pentagon's Brain," "Operation Paperclip," and "Surprise, Kill, Vanish."

Her most recent book is "First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance."

In this conversation, Jacobsen explains how biometric technology was used by the U.S. military in an attempt to create a database containing personal biological information (such as iris scans) on millions of Afghan civilians. Jacobsen explains t that his kind of data collection is part of a great change in post-9/11 military planning, where highly detailed information about individuals is viewed as more valuable than intelligence about armies. Jacobsen warns that biometric information and surveillance are increasingly a part of day-to-day life in America, where privacy and other civil liberties are being imperiled and the public remains largely unaware.

Towards the end of this conversation, Jacobsen details how the Chinese government is using the biometric techniques and technologies used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan to empower state repression, including ethnic cleansing and a totalitarian "brainwashing" campaign directed against the Uyghur people.

We have just seen the withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by the 20-year anniversary of Sept. 11 and, of course, the ongoing tsunami of daily news on the day-to-day about Trump, the pandemic and politics more generally. How are you feeling? How are you making sense of it?

I think of it as another day at the reporter's desk. It also just another day at the storyteller's desk. I try to look at events through the long lens of history.

These events in Afghanistan strike me as being part of a cycle of history that is repeating itself. On the anniversary of 9/11 and with what happened in Afghanistan, I am nodding my head as I reflect upon on what Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell speech, which is the military-industrial complex.

That phrase is now part of the vernacular. But what is the military-industrial complex, specifically? How does that concept help us to understand Afghanistan and the "War on Terror"?

The military-industrial complex is the idea that there is a need for weapons that is created by wars, that in turn creates a need for weapons. It is part of a very large system. It's actually been called a "system of systems" that pushes the idea of a military-industrial complex forward ad infinitum. It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's a self-fulfilling situation.

How do the military-industrial complex and related actors see Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East more broadly?

By no means am I suggesting that there is some cloak-an-dagger situation where people are sitting around and saying, "Let's start a war." What exists are these different systems that are entwined and work with one another. Consider Afghanistan. In my book "First Platoon," I write about the origin story of what is known as "biometrics."

Many people among the general public do not know what biometrics is. But they should start to care, because biometrics will be part of everyone's life very soon — and it actually already is, but most people don't know it yet.

Biometrics includes such things as fingerprints, iris scans, facial images and your DNA.Biometrics exist in the civilian and private sector and also in the defense world. Biometrics have long been applied in the criminal justice world. These elements are now merging together.

After 9/11, the Defense Department was shocked. The organizations inside the Defense Department that are involved in strategic planning suddenly realized: "Oh my God, here we are looking at the threat from satellite technology and how armies are going to be positioned." That had been the way of war throughout the Cold War for some 50 years. Then suddenly 9/11 happens, and the focus goes from extraordinarily wide and high satellite images to the myopic, literally down to one person. Nineteen individual men hijacked those planes and created 9/11 and then created the War on Terror.

The focus of the Defense Department swung around, and suddenly it was all about the individual. There is an organization that is part of the Defense Department called the Defense Science Board. They are made up of former military generals and members of the intelligence community — people who think about the next wave of weapons.

The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, goes to the Defense Science Board after 9/11 and says, "What are we going to do? How are we going to win the War on Terror?"

And the Defense Science Board says, "We've got a great idea. We must create a Manhattan Project like program to tag, track and locate individual people." That is the birth of biometrics.

If you flash forward to the war in Afghanistan, the Defense Department was collecting biometrics and their goal was to include 80% of Afghan civilians. That is why soldiers were sent into the field with biometric capturing devices.

These are the young soldiers I interview in "First Platoon." They thought they were going to fight the Taliban. Instead they found themselves walking around in some of the most dangerous places in the world, stopping farmers in their fields and saying, "I need your fingerprint scanned." They were stopping women and saying, "Please lift up your veil. I need to take your iris scan." The enmity that created is astonishing. How could we possibly have thought that was a good idea, and a good way to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people?

What role did biometrics play on a daily basis for American soldiers and other warfighters in Afghanistan? How was the technology used, and to what ends?

The ultimate idea was that the Defense Department wanted to create a database of the Afghans' biometrics, their fingerprints, their iris scans, their facial images and their DNA, so that they have a big database of people. So in the event that someone committed a crime they could use that information to come up with what is called a "match hit."

We have the same system here in the United States. It is used by the FBI, but you have to have been a criminal or a criminal suspect to come in contact with it. If I get pulled over and the police decide to take my fingerprints, they're not going to get a match hit. They do not have my fingerprints because I have not been arrested. But this is changing, because they now have my iris scans because I went through U.S. customs when I came back from abroad.

To get biometric data on the Afghan people, the Defense Department pursued a program where they gave out these little biometric capturing devices — some were called "hides" and some were called "seeks." These devices all had different names and acronyms. There would be one person tasked with that responsibility per platoon. Once the patrol returns with biometric information, that soldier links up to another system and uploads the new information into the database.

What are some of the other systems interfacing with biometrics? It sounds like science fiction made real with a total surveillance society and detection of "pre-crime."

When I interviewed soldiers for First Platoon," only the person from the COIST team knew about the biometric mission. That knowledge is partitioned. But the real "aha" moment for me, when I was doing my reporting, was when I learned about something called a PGGS Airship. This is a giant balloon that was not visible to the soldiers on the ground from their outpost. It is tethered to a steel cable. The PGGS flies high in the air and is outfitted with a number of surveillance cameras that watch the soldiers on patrol. That system was gathering surveillance footage, what's called "full motion video," That sounds generic, but it actually has geolocating technology embedded into it.

That footage is then uploaded. The U.S. Army uses Palantir software, which aggregates the data and helps the Defense Department to identify targets. These "targets" are human beings. Based on that information a drone strike will be ordered on individual people or a group of persons.

What will it mean to the average American when this technology is used here in this country?

It is already here. These biometric and surveillance systems, such as the PGSS aerostat system, were born of war and have now come home to the United States.

This is all very tricky because of the ways in which biometric capture can occur. Here is one example. A person used to have to take an iris scan by putting a device up to your eyes. Going through U.S. Customs, you are told to put your face in a certain position. You think that a picture of your face is being taken. That is true, but your iris is also being scanned. DARPA is now actually planning to be to get a person's iris scans from 500 feet away.

For "First Platoon" I interviewed a police chief who explained the controversial aspects of something called "Clearview," which is a type of facial recognition technology. The police chief wanted to show me how it worked. We walked out to the street, and he said, "Turn that corner and walk around and come toward me." He pointed his iPhone in my direction.

Now there were all these photographs of me. I'm a public figure, so a person could reasonably conclude that is pretty easy to accomplish. However, there were private photographs of me there as well that had been posted elsewhere. It was all at the policeman's fingertips before I even reached him.

The technology itself is moving forward at science fiction-like speed. By comparison, these questions of privacy, search and seizure, and other constitutional rights are being debated at a snail's pace by the courts. The biometric systems will never go away. The courts cannot keep up with it. I believe that this is a real canary in the coal mine situation.

How are the American people going to be convinced that these biometric systems are a good thing? I am thinking specifically of how people willingly surrender so much personal information when they go to the supermarket or any online retailer, which is tracking their behavior in exchange for a discount. Another example would be people who give their DNA to online companies for supposed genealogical research or health purposes.

As you said, a person wants a discount at a store, for example. You quickly weigh the costs and benefits. Biometrics is just information about you. What the Department of Defense really wants is "identity dominance." In practice, this means that the Defense Department wants to know more about you than you know. A person may reply with, "How is that possible? No one can know more about me than me!" Well, I do not know what my heartbeat is right now. But the Defense Department is creating a biometric to be able to figure that out and identify me by my heartbeat. In that way, they know more about me than I do.

How should we explain to the public how dangerous this is?

It's the "if then." If I'm just walking down the street and all this information about me exists, it doesn't matter. But it's the "if then." If the police want to use the database for whatever reason, it is there.

Consider what is happening in China, where the government is persecuting the Uyghur people. They have decided that the Uyghurs are bad, so the Beijing government now requires that the Uyghur population undergo something called "physicals for all." That is the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda line. What is really means is that they must have their biometrics taken. This includes fingerprints, iris scans, facial images and DNA. If you are Uyghur, you must do that. There is now a Uyghur database that is being used to identify an entire population. That reminds me a lot of Nazi Germany.

It gets even worse, because we now know from satellite footage that the Chinese government is digging up cemeteries where Uyghur people are buried. This suggests to me that the Chinese government is looking at familial DNA. They are planning to cast that net wider. People who might not look like a Uyghur but are of Uyghur descent will be drawn into the pool of people who have been identified as "suspicious" and may need to be sent to a "re-education" camp.

This is terrifying. I would ask human rights organizations: Are you aware that what the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs with biometrics is a page right out of the playbook of the U.S. Department of Defense in Afghanistan? We did it before the Chinese. We gave the Chinese the idea. No one comments on that.

Where is this information being stored in the United States? Is it possible to opt out or have your biometric information deleted?

There is now a biometric center in West Virginia where lots of the information is housed. Moreover, it is actually the first time on U.S. soil where the FBI and the Defense Department are collaborating on a program, which raises a whole bunch of other issues about posse comitatus. The Biometric Technology Center is new, it only opened in 2018. Its databases are growing. The State Department recently agreed to share some 80 million passport photos with other federal agencies. All of those facial images are going into the database.

There is no opting out. You're more than likely already in the system. The only people who are not in that database are those of us who do not have a driver's license or a passport, have never used Facebook or other social media, or have never had a problem with law enforcement.

Donald Trump returned to his beloved rally stage over the weekend to perform his greatest hits in front of a Georgia crowd. It was a large and ecstatic crowd. What else is new? If there was any hope of Trump's fans getting tired of him, there is no sign of it yet.

From asking the crowd what it must be like to be married to Hillary Clinton and eliciting a raucous rendition of "Lock Her Up!" to complaining about the border as his followers chanted "Build That Wall," Trump delivered his tried and true staples. He declared that he loves law enforcement and the military and the 2nd Amendment and even bragged about making people say Merry Christmas once again. And when he asked, "Is there anything as fun as a Trump rally?" he truly brought the house down. In the end, they all danced awkwardly to the 70s hook-up song, YMCA before heading home spent and satisfied.

This stuff never gets old, apparently.

But for all the familiar old saws, Trump spent most of his time pushing the Big Lie, taking it to even higher levels of delusion, implying that President Obama stole his two elections and asserting that the Arizona "fraudit" went his way:

He also got huge applause trashing Republicans he believes betrayed him by failing to cheat, at one point suggesting that Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams would be a better governor than the current GOP governor Brian Kemp. His followers loved every minute of it, lustily booing Kemp and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In their minds, as in Trump's, the Democrats and RINOs are one in the same: They are the enemy.

It's hard to know if the rally crowd represents the average Trump follower but the polls indicate that he is still massively popular with Republicans so it stands to reason they are generally happy with the Trumpism on display at his gatherings. As so many have marveled when asked what they like about him, he says what they're thinking.

I couldn't help but ponder that when I read some recent analyses of the 2020 election once again looking at the question of "what does the white working class voter really want?" The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog turned the spotlight on the upcoming Virginia governor's race and looked at the three big cultural markers that separate the urban from the rural voters: faith, gun ownership and race.

I don't think I have to explain the differences among the Democrats and Republicans on those issues. Democratic strategist James Carville blames the urban voters for being elitist and chasing away voters with their big city ways. Analyst Ruy Teixeira believes that Democrats are out of step culturally with the mainstream of America and, as a result, have put a ceiling on their appeal. Teixeira makes a number of suggestions as to how to become more culturally palatable to Real Americans and suggests:

The way to lift that ceiling is clear: move to the center to embrace the views enumerated above, all of which are compatible with a robust program of full employment, social safety net expansion and public investment. Indeed, the ironic aspect of this is that the public writ large, including the median voter, are more open to such a program than they have been in decades, yet the Democrats' cultural leftism interferes with their ability to focus on their popular economic program and avoid unpopular positions that have little to do with that program.

In other words, he believes that delivering a popular economic program will bring them back as long as the Democrats don't upset them with all this cultural leftism. But after crunching the numbers, the Monkey Cage analysts found that it's not urban arrogance or cultural leftism that's at the root of the problem and neither are different attitudes about gun ownership or faith. The problem is race. This is evident by the fact that rural white voters simply refuse to acknowledge that racism exists:

[I]f voters in urban and rural areas acknowledged White privilege at the same rate, the urban-rural voting divide would be relatively small, just eight points. That the divide is actually 32 points speaks to the powerful role that racism plays in fueling this gap. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Virginia Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin attacked the teaching of critical race theory, making it a cornerstone of his campaign.
Our findings suggest that messaging isn't the problem, as Carville asserted. Rather, rural Americans prefer Trump's racially charged politics and denial that racism exists. Fueled by a core disagreement over racism in the United States, the urban-rural divide is likely to continue in 2021 and beyond.

This analysis tracks with earlier findings in the wake of the 2016 election when the media decided that Trump's win was based upon the "economic anxiety" of the white working class and spent months chasing them through diners in the South and the rustbelt to prove it. Then, as now, the analysis just didn't add up. Non-college educated voters exist throughout the country but the ones who loved Trump were those white, mostly rural, and often more affluent Fox News viewers who were filled with grievance and resentment against people of color.

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia begs to differ with both of these analyses. He agrees that economic insecurity had little to do with non-college educated votes for Trump in 2020 but believes it's "fundamentally" about ideology. He writes:

I find that support for Donald Trump among white working class voters reflected conservative views across a wide range of policy issues including social welfare issues, cultural issues, racial justice issues, gun control, immigration, and climate change. In other words, the rejection of the Democratic Party by white working class voters is fundamentally ideological. This fact makes it very unlikely that Democrats will be able to win back large numbers of white working class voters by appealing to their economic self-interest.

I don't know which of these analyses are correct, although I'm deeply skeptical that taming the "cultural left" will have any effect on those who are allegedly so offended by it that they will instead vote for the likes of Donald Trump. I am convinced that racism lies at the heart of most of the grievance and hostility that animates the right, and I also think that easily evolves into a more holistic worldview that encompases grievance across the entire ideological spectrum leading to conspiratorial thinking and an abandonment of critical thinking. Still, I'm not sure that adds up to a coherent ideology. It's more of a tribal identity.

Trumpism's appeal rests on the fact that Trump himself is very careful to stay within the bounds of all those issues Sabato lists. He uses his rallies to feel them out and adjust accordingly. In that way he is the ultimate follower, not a leader. What he does is express their loathing for racial and religious minorities and immigrants, gun control advocates, climate change, tolerance, equality and pluralism in the crude, bullying, hostile way that validates their existing beliefs. Basically, he completes them.

For those readers who only peruse headlines — which, as anyone who has access to news website analytics can tell you, is a shockingly huge percentage of readers — the impending first round of vaccine mandate deadlines are looking like very scary business indeed. Not for people who are afraid of needles, mind you, but those who are afraid that mass resignations and firings — and subsequent staffing shortages of essential workers — are coming.

"These Health Care Workers Would Rather Get Fired Than Get Vaccinated," reads a Monday morning headline at the New York Times.

"New York Hospitals Face Possible Mass Firings as Workers Spurn Vaccines," reads another from Friday.

"Rural Hospitals Worry They Will Lose Staff Because Of Biden's New Vaccine Mandate," warns an NPR headline from over the weekend.

"New York May Use The National Guard To Replace Unvaccinated Health Care Workers," read another.

The state of New York is the first test case of what actually enforcing a government-issued vaccine mandate looks like. Monday is the deadline for health care workers in the state to get the jab or get the pink slip. As the New York Times reports, "resistance to vaccine mandates has so far stopped most states from threatening to fire unvaccinated workers." But New York's newly appointed governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul is calling the unvaccinateds' bluff. Rather than caving in and letting them keep their jobs, she is prepared to call the National Guard to fill in the shortages left by the upcoming firings.

Despite the media doom and gloom, the truth is Hochul needs to be commended for her spine. And every other Democrat who wants to see this pandemic actually come to an end (which should be all of them!) should follow suit. Staffing shortages are a pain, especially during a pandemic, no doubt. But staffing shortages are a minor issue compared to the damage being caused by the unchecked spread of COVID-19, which is increasingly due to one cause: right-wingers who have made refusal to get vaccinated a culture war and identity politics issue. Unless such folks start tasting real consequences for their behavior, the U.S. is going to see another dark winter, as the virus continues to wreak havoc on our economy and health care system. Putting up with staffing shortages is a small price to pay to make sure that Trumpers — a class of people clearly unused to the idea that actions have consequences — actually start feeling real pressure to get vaccinated.

These dread-inducing headlines and anecdotal stories about health care workers quitting are concealing what is actually the far more important story: Vaccine mandates work.

A few paragraphs under the scary headline about "mass firings" in the New York Times comes the actual numbers: "As of Sept. 22, state data shows, around 84 percent of New York's 450,000 hospital workers and 83 percent of its 145,400 nursing home employees had been fully vaccinated." That is almost 10 percentage points over what the same state data set shows as the overall vaccination rate in the state. There are similar positive results in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio mandated vaccines for public school workers, resulting in a 90% vaccination rate among teachers, which is 9 percentage points over the city average. Hospital systems that instituted an earlier vaccine mandate have seen even better results. New York Presbyterian, for example, set the deadline for last Wednesday and already 99% of the system's 48,000 workers are vaccinated.

The effectiveness of mandates has been documented outside of New York as well.

As Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former White House health policy adviser who works for the University of Pennsylvania now, told Fierce Healthcare, "healthcare systems that have actually mandated this" have " retained over 99% of their workforce." The article goes on to list over a dozen hospital systems that have implemented mandates. In every case, the fraction of workers lost was tiny — certainly well worth losing to protect patients and the larger community from COVID-19.

There's been a similar success at United Airlines, which will start putting workers on leave this week if they don't get vaccinated. A full 97% of employees have thus beat the deadline.

There's a lot of reasons conservatives cite for this refusal to vaccinate, though ultimately it all boils down to a desire to "own the liberals." But a lot of this pettiness is intertwined with a right-wing bravado. To be blunt, white privilege has long shielded many conservatives from the concept of facing consequences for their actions. We see this in a lot of obnoxious right-wing behavior lately, from tantrums over COVID-19 mitigation measures in public places to the attempted insurrection on January 6. Who can forget how many of the arrested Trump supporters expressed genuine shock that they might actually face a legal consequence for participating in a violent effort to overthrow democracy? This lack of familiarity with consequences is likely why there are so many holdouts, even in the face of vaccine mandates. Bluntly put, a lot of them probably don't think that leaders are serious about these threats to fire them, and won't believe it until it happens. As with the Capitol rioters, there's a persistent disbelief on the right that they will ever face real consequences for their bad actions.

This right-wing overconfidence is why sites like HermainCainAward and SorryAntiVaxxer have such popular followings. Watching people pay with their lives after displaying such certainty their anti-social behavior will never result in a consequence may not be the most righteous use of people's time, but is understandable when the rest of us are suffering because of Trumpist hubris. The problem with highlighting COVID-19 deaths to scare the Trumpers straight, however, is that they can always tell themselves that they're not going to be the ones who die since 98.4% of people in the U.S. do survive.

That's precisely why vaccine mandates are so important. The absolute certainty of losing a job is going to motivate a lot more people than the more abstract risk of dying of COVID-19.

But for that threat to become real, well, it has to be real. This means that it's not enough to threaten to fire people who won't get vaccinated. Employers and governments have to follow through. Hochul is right to do whatever it takes to make sure that the unvaccinated get their pink slips this week. If leaders back down in the face of vaccine resistance, the Trumpers will double down, and continue spreading COVID-19 in a pathetic effort to "own the liberals." Threats cannot be empty, especially when facing stubborn people who believe themselves impervious to consequences. Threats need to be backed up with action. It's time to start firing the unvaccinated.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., apparently told former President Donald Trump at one point that he "f'd up" the presidency during a conversation earlier this year in which Graham tried to convince Trump that he had actually lost the 2020 election.

Author and Washington Post legend Bob Woodward shared the anecdote, pulled from his new book "Peril," during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, outlining the tough love that Trump reportedly got over the phone from his South Carolina colleague.

"We quote conversations between Sen. Graham and Trump in which Lindsey Graham says to Trump, 'You f'd up your presidency' at one point just a couple of months ago," Woodward said, adding that Trump hung up shortly after.

The next day, Trump apparently called Graham back, at which point Graham said: "I would have hung up too."

The incident seems a far cry from Graham's public statements about the former president, in which he is nothing but supportive. As recently as Saturday night, the South Carolina Republican told a Michigan GOP conference that he hopes Trump runs again.

"I don't think Trump is listening. He might be," Graham said. "I hope President Trump runs again."

You can watch the segment below via Twitter:

Talk show host Bill Maher hit back at Whoopi Goldberg Friday night during an episode of his HBO show "Real Time," the latest in an ongoing feud between the two television personalities over the NFL's new pregame ritual of playing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," known as the Black national anthem, in addition to the actual national anthem.

"New rule," Maher said Friday, the phrase marking a longtime segment on the show. "the only time there should be two national anthems is when the other team is from Canada."

He then addressed Goldberg's comments specifically, which she made earlier this week on the popular daytime TV juggernaut "The View."

He said the women-led talk show "devoted a lot of time" to the topic, with Goldberg talking about the history of the song itself "while somehow avoiding what I actually said."

"When it comes to an anthem, it doesn't have to be the one that we currently use, but it has to be just one. You know, because it's a national anthem," Maher said.

"Symbols of unity matter," he continued. "And purposefully fragmenting things by race reinforces a terrible message that we are two nations hopelessly drifting apart from each other. That's not where we were 10 years ago, and it shouldn't be where we are now."

The feud began earlier this month when Maher said that the addition of a separate anthem segregated by race, in addition to similar trends on college campuses, essentially heralded a return to segregation "under a different name."

A few days later on "The View," Goldberg lamented having to "re-educate people" on the need for parallel institutions for people of color. "We have gone backwards a good 10, 15 years," she said.

Maher, needless to say, disagrees.

"We need to stop regarding this new woke segregation as if it's some sort of cultural advancement," Maher said Friday. "It's not."

Watch the entire segment below via HBO:

New Rule: Don't Segregate the Anthem | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) www.youtube.com

Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin has unveiled new ads starring Virginians who have embraced anti-vaccine and anti-mask rhetoric, even as Youngkin tries to push back on Democratic criticism of his "Trumpian" pandemic policy.

Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor — thanks to the state's peculiar one-term limit — has focused his statements and ads this month on attacking Youngkin for opposing vaccine requirements for health workers and mask mandates in schools. The issue came to a head during their first debate last week, when McAuliffe accused Youngkin, who is vaccinated and has personally encouraged people to get vaccinated, of being anti-vaccine. McAuliffe vowed to support vaccine mandates for health workers, educators and employees who would be covered by President Joe Biden's federal mandate.

Youngkin, a former private equity CEO who is using his wealth to fund his campaign, has helped bankroll anti-vaccine Republican candidates and urged "everyone who does not want to get the vaccine for whatever reason" to seek an exemption from mandates. He drew criticism earlier this month from Virginia doctors after opposing vaccine requirements and vowing to reverse Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's policy requiring schools to follow guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Youngkin, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, has tried to walk a fine line in appealing to Republican base voters, who largely oppose vaccine and mask requirements, while attempting not to alienate independent and suburban voters he needs to win an increasingly blue state. Though polls currently show the two candidates neck and neck, a recent survey found that nearly 70% of Virginia voters support vaccine requirements for teachers and staff and mask requirements in schools and 55% support businesses requiring vaccines for employees. Nearly 80% of the state's voting-age population has already received at least one dose of the vaccine.

Youngkin has tried to push back on McAuliffe's criticism over his vaccine position, airing a new ad featuring three doctors who accuse the Democrat of waging a "smear campaign" and putting politics over science.

One of the doctors, Peter Zedler, has echoed anti-mask rhetoric on his Facebook page, writing last year that "'Controlling the virus' is just nonsense." In another post, he criticized Biden for not pursuing herd immunity through uncontrolled infection, a strategy that medical experts have warned could kill millions. Earlier this year, Zedler was also $300 by the Virginia Republican Party for "vote tabulations" after the party nominated Youngkin in May.

Another one of the doctors in Youngkin's ad, Georgeanne Long, was among the hosts for a Youngkin fundraiser featuring former Attorney General Bill Barr on Thursday, meaning she and her husband would have had to donate at least $25,000. Her husband previously donated more than $3,000 to Youngkin's campaign.

Another new Youngkin ad features Loudoun County teacher Paul Troth, who has repeatedly pushed anti-vaccine talking points on his Facebook page. Troth has railed against "sheep" who support vaccine requirements while repeatedly posting the slogan "My body, my choice." In other posts he compared the vaccines to dangerous discontinued drugs that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration decades earlier, calling vaccine requirements "forced vaccinations." Troth has also praised Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for refusing the vaccine, described Biden as the "epitome of tyranny," and posted a meme claiming that "Trump was right" about hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial medication that has no proven benefit against Covid and has been found to cause heart problems, blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries and liver problems, according to the FDA. Troth has also complained about new protections for transgender students in his school district, calling it a "disgrace" and a "clown show."

"Glenn Youngkin's track record consists of sowing doubt about the vaccine, emboldening anti-vaccine extremists, and advancing reckless policies that would prolong the pandemic," Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for the Virginia Democratic Party, said in a statement to Salon. "His decision to put anti-vaccine and anti-mask actors on television is nothing if not consistent with his dangerous, Trumpian agenda."

Youngkin, on the other hand, has criticized McAullife for refusing to appear in a pro-vaccine PSA with him.

"These dishonest smears from Terry McAuliffe are just a sign of how desperate he is. Glenn Youngkin is the only candidate in the race with a TV ad encouraging Virginians to join him in getting vaccinated," a spokesperson for Youngkin said in a statement to Salon. "Terry McAuliffe's record consists of appointing a top anti-vax activist who called vaccines a 'holocaust of poison' to a state board because she donated to his campaign, failing to comply with federal law by violating President Biden's Amtrak mask mandate this year, and refusing to put politics aside and film a joint pro-vaccine PSA with Youngkin that could save lives."

McAuliffe pushed back on the criticism during last week's debate.

"He is not requiring vaccinations. That is the difference between the two of us. Asking to do a PSA is a political stunt," he said. "Who cares about PSAs? Half the people wouldn't know who you are on TV."

While Youngkin has run pro-vaccine PSAs alongside the ad with doctors criticizing McAuliffe, his vaccine-themed ads made up just 11% of his total TV advertising over the last week and a half, according to Politico. Youngkin's campaign has largely focused on his sheriff endorsements and his proposal to eliminate the state's grocery tax. By comparison, more than 60% of McAuliffe's ads have focused on vaccines.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom likewise focused on his pandemic response to easily beat back a Republican recall attempt and Democrats increasingly believe that pointing to the clear contrast between Democratic and Republican positions on COVID policy is a winning strategy. More than 60% of voters in the California recall backed vaccine requirements and more than 70% supported school mask mandates, according to exit polls.

"His Day 1 plan would be to unleash COVID," McAuliffe said before calling his opponent a "Trump wannabe" at the debate. "I think that's life-threatening. And I think that's disqualifying as governor."

In May of this year, Donald Trump began telling associates that he plans to run for president in 2024 if he is healthy enough. In July, he told dinner pals that he is running. Just this month, he reiterated that he is likely to run again. The twice-impeached ex-president is increasing his media appearances and planning campaign-style rallies in Georgia and Iowa.

Trump's humiliating defeat to Joe Biden — which he refuses to acknowledge even occurred — has fomented a yearning for redemption. Whether he actually runs again remains uncertain, but he wants his supporters to be ready, willing and primed.

As Trump keeps his millions of supporters in suspense, they must answer one difficult question: Do they really want to continue to support a man who despises them and hurts them?

Donald Trump has always abhorred his supporters. He does not feel an ounce of empathy or affection for those who profess their devotion to him. He sees his supporters as weak, stupid and inferior. They are losers to him. He hates his supporters as much as he wants to destroy his detractors.

Actions speak louder than words. Just look at Trump's actions toward his supporters.

The best example is his detached, irresponsible and inept handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died on his watch. He relied on conspiracy theories, magical thinking, blatant lies and distractions to fool the American public. Trump followers in red states have died in huge numbers because they erroneously and foolishly believed he was the benevolent master of their fate. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was, in fact, an accessory to murder. His supporters' lives meant nothing to him.

Another example is Trump's incitement of the insurrection of the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was willing to overthrow democracy in order to remain in power. So he fabricated the Big Lie, knowing full well that his cult followers would carry out his anti-democratic mission. Was he on the front line with his supporters? Of course not — because he is a coward. He watched it all unfold on television as he cheered them on from the protected and comfortable surroundings of the White House. Trump wanted the election undermined and demanded that followers accomplish that goal. The result was failure, destruction, deaths, arrests and widespread condemnation. Trump has left his followers dangling in defeat. He has taken no responsibility for his incitement and has demonstrated no concern or remorse for his loyalists who face damaging legal consequences. He has thrown them under the bus because he detests them.

Millions of aggrieved Americans have tethered themselves to Trump's fake persona of superiority and strength. They think he is the answer to their prayers. They think he cares about their lot in life. They think he will remedy their grievances. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Trump is a shameless opportunist. He manipulates people to achieve his personal goals, then discards them. He does not care if his supporters are racists, felons, crooks or murderers. He does not care if they are xenophobes or misogynists. He will accept the support of anyone who will blindly follow his lead and put him on a pedestal — after all, exalted status is what he longs for. He desperately wants to be a dictator so that his grifting and corrupt impulses can run wild. And, remember, dictators only care about themselves and loathe people who expect anything from them.

Trump scorns those who are weak or foolish enough to need him. He does not want to be needed — he wants others to serve and satiate his needs. He thrives on their praise, adulation and unconditional loyalty. The whole concept of public service is foreign to him because he perceives every interaction is a transactional game that must be won. And winning, for him, inevitably means defeat and humiliation of the other person. In Trump's psyche, even his supporters need to be humiliated and defeated.

It is puzzling that Trump supporters have not realized that he does not give a damn about their grievances or station in life. His Republican Party literally has no platform or set of guiding principles — all that was abandoned during the 2020 campaign. Nor does the Republican Party have a single substantive policy initiative on the table. Other than conservative judicial appointments, Trump did absolutely nothing for his supporters during his miserable presidential term. Except, of course, to let them be killed by a virus and incite them to a failed overthrow of democracy.

Until Trump is gone and the Republican Party reinvents itself, Trump supporters are all alone to fend for themselves. Their cult leader is an illusion. He is a pied piper leading them only to destruction. He has brought them only pain and suffering and sold them a bill of goods consisting of lies and conspiracy theories.

All because he despises his supporters. That's the best reason why they should dump him now, before he harms them even more.

Allan Lichtman has a track record of accurately predicting presidential elections, and is generally an astute observer of the American political scene. So I paid attention when Lichtman, a political science professor at American University, told me it would be disastrous for President Biden to go war against Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and the other centrist Democrats jamming him up in Congress.

Lichtman was fully aware that progressives were eager to purge obstructionist Democrats, or at least punish them somehow for constricting or defeating Biden's legislative agenda. I had already spoken to a historian — Harvey J. Kaye, the editor of "FDR on Democracy" — who pithily summed up the logic behind that point of view.

"Look, there's two choices," Kaye said. "For the sake of the future, he should literally go after them, period." His "them" clearly referred to Manchin and Sinema. "But for the sake of democracy in the near term, what happens if the Republicans win?" Kaye added that he could not understand "why Biden hasn't called Manchin" and the others and told them that their political survival depended on toeing the line.

In my conversation with Lichtman, he quoted humorist Will Rogers' famous quip: "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." Kaye said basically the same thing. I reached out to both of them for Salon about the most conspicuous example of a president turning against legislators from his own party: Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to purge right-wing Democrats in the 1938 midterm elections. My primary question was about what lessons Biden could learn from that moment, given that his own presidency may go down in flames because of intransigent "moderate" Democrats.

FDR certainly wasn't the first Democratic president to turn against members of his own party. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson campaigned against five Southern legislators who opposed his World War I policies, and only all one of them actually defeated his Wilson-backed challenger. But that was a different era, when the Democratic Party's chaos led to an ideological vacuum. Instead of trying to fill that vacuum, Wilson weeded out politicians who opposed him on a specific set of policies that were widely supported by both parties. So there's no clear parallel to Biden in 2021.

Roosevelt's situation was at least somewhat similar. He explicitly wanted the 1938 midterm elections to realign the Democratic Party in a more liberal direction. Speaking to the nation in a "Fireside Chat" on June 24, Roosevelt characterized the coming primaries as containing "many clashes between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and conservative." Liberals recognized "that the new conditions throughout the world call for new remedies," he said, while conservatives do not "recognize the need for government itself to step in and take action to meet these new problems." Concerned that obstructionist members of Congress might roll back his achievements in creating unemployment insurance, old age pensions, anti-monopoly measures and regulation of the financial industry, Roosevelt accused them of wanting a return "to the kind of government that we had in the 1920s." He didn't need to remind his listeners that those policies had plunged America into the Great Depression. As he saw it, Democrats needed to rid themselves of the conservatives who hindering his vision before they destroyed his new liberal coalition.

Well: It didn't work. FDR targeted Rep. John J. O'Connor of New York, then chairman of the House Rules Committee, along with 10 Democratic senators, and only O'Connor was defeated in a primary. This was more than an immediate political setback for Roosevelt, although it definitely counted as that. (Democrats lost seven seats in the Senate and 72 in the House, although they started out with such a huge margin they still retained control of Congress.) In a way, his desire to realign American politics along more ideological lines worked. Right-wing Democrats from the South realized they had common cause with conservative Republicans from the Midwest, and their "conservative coalition" controlled Congress for a generation, shaping national policy regardless of which party officially had a majority. If anything, Roosevelt weakened the liberal cause rather than strengthening it. His only consolation was that many of the policies he was worried would get targeted wound up staying intact.

While the parallels between Roosevelt's predicament and Biden's are inexact, they are similar in the big ways that count. Biden's critics on the left want him to wage political war against the likes of Manchin, Sinema, and Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, middle-path Democrats who appear willing to sacrifice his entire agenda in the interest of "bipartisanship." It sounds like strength. It almost certainly would not work.

As Kaye pointed out, Biden simply doesn't have the votes that FDR did, either in Congress or the nation at large. Roosevelt was a deeply beloved figure who had won re-election in 1936 in what at the time was the biggest electoral landslide in history. Biden, although he won decisively in 2020, has a narrower mandate. Lichtman noted that attacking moderate Democrats would imperil the Senate, where even one lost seat would swing the 50-50 body to the Republicans. If Democrats wanted a coalition large enough to render the "centrists" irrelevant, they would need to turn out in larger numbers and elect more Democrats to Congress and local offices. That hasn't happened, and at this moment Biden's legislative coalition is not large enough, nor is his popular support deep enough, even to contemplate Roosevelt's strategy — which, again, did not even work out for the most popular president of the 20th century.

The underlying problem, perhaps, is that the Democratic Party, in its current form, is fundamentally incompetent. Salon executive editor Andrew O'Hehir addressed this a recent article about Democrats' failure to eliminate the filibuster and protect voting rights.

This isn't a nice thing to say about a bunch of mostly sane and approximately reasonable people, but here's the truth: If you set out to design a left-center political party that was fated to surrender, little by little, to authoritarianism — because of circumstances beyond its control, because of internal indecision and ideological fuzziness, because it faced an entrenched and deranged opposition party, because of whatever — you could hardly do better than the current version of the Democratic Party.

This isn't just about Kyrsten Sinema flipping on prescription drug prices right after taking large campaign donations from Big Pharma. Democrats seem incapable of addressing the fundamental problems with our economy and lacks the internal cohesion to stand up to Republicans who are using Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election to erode or eliminate democracy. Those issues can't be corrected by defeating Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — which is also probably impossible and likely undesirable. The Democratic Party's best hope is to make itself relevant and vital again, which is a much larger problem.